Pollicipes pollicipes
Pollicipes pollicipes, known as the goose neck barnacle, goose barnacle or leaf barnacle is a species of goose barnacle, also well known under the taxonomic synonym Pollicipes cornucopia. It is closely related to Pollicipes polymerus, a species with the same common names, but found on the Pacific coast of North America, and to Pollicipes elegans a species from the coast of Chile. It is found on rocky shores in the north-east Atlantic Ocean and is prized as a delicacy, especially in the Iberian Peninsula.

Hans Hillewaert · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikipedia/Commons. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.
On record
Recorded, not inferred- Sits inside
- PollicipesPBDB
- Diet
- suspension feederPBDB, for Cirripedia
- Life habit
- epifaunalPBDB, for Cirripedia
- Motility
- stationary, attached, epibiontPBDB, for Cirripedia
- Vision
- limitedPBDB, for Cirripedia
Time the record covers
At most 129 thousand years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 129 ka and 0 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
6 occurrences of Pollicipes pollicipes on record, most of them in the Holocene. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.
When
6 occurrences- Pleistocene15%
- Holocene85%
These are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.
Pollicipes pollicipes and its relatives
HoloceneWhere Pollicipes pollicipes and its relatives were recorded in the Holocene.
Found in the same rock
10 taxa- Decapoda4 sites
- Paracentrotus4 sites
- Carcinus maenas2 sites
- Portunus2 sites
- Cancer pagurus1 site
- Eriphia spinifrons1 site
- Monachus monachus1 site
- Pachygrapsus1 site
- Serranidae1 site
- Xantho1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 6 sites for Pollicipes pollicipes, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too.
This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.
Entered from
1 referenceEach of the 6 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. Each entry links to doi.org. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Pollicipes pollicipes
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Hans Hillewaert
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Pollicipes pollicipes was found in Sketchfab.
Smithsonian Open Access and MorphoSource were not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.
The description on this site
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itPollicipes through timeFormations of the HoloceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Gmelin 1790)