Sparidae
Sparidae, the seabreams and porgies, is a family of ray-finned fishes belonging to the order Acanthuriformes, although they were previously classified in the order Perciformes. The over 150 species are found in shallow and deep marine waters in temperate through tropical regions around the world. Most species are demersal carnivores.

Amada44 · CC BY-SA 3.0 · 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
- PerciformesPBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB, for Perciformes
- Life habit
- nektonicPBDB, for Perciformes
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Perciformes
Time the record covers
At least 93 million years on record.
The record covers at least 93.9 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 100.5 Mya to 0 Mya.
565 occurrences of Sparidae on record, most of them in the Miocene. 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
565 occurrences- Late Cretaceous2%
- Paleoceneunder 1%
- Eocene11%
- Oligocene8%
- Miocene54%
- Pliocene11%
- Pleistocene9%
- Holocene3%
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.
Found in
111 formations
- Lagos-Portimão Formation43
- Hrušky Formation27
- Raz-el-Ain Formation13
- Lindos Bay Formation12
- Calcarenites of Sant Elm Formation7
- London Clay Formation · Thames Group7
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The named rock units Sparidae has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 87 further formations hold fewer occurrences each and are not listed. 270 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Sparidae and its relatives
MioceneWhere Sparidae and its relatives were recorded in the Miocene.
Found in the same rock
4,419 taxa- Carcharhinus34 sites
- Hemipristis serra32 sites
- Sparus31 sites
- Otodus megalodon27 sites
- Myliobatis25 sites
- Carcharodon hastalis24 sites
- Dasyatis24 sites
- Dentex24 sites
- Galeocerdo aduncus23 sites
- Isurus oxyrinchus23 sites
- Carcharias taurus21 sites
- Lesueurigobius21 sites
- Teleostei20 sites
- Aetobatus18 sites
- Pagrus18 sites
- Archosargus17 sites
- Carcharias cuspidatus17 sites
- Deltentosteus17 sites
- Maurolicus muelleri17 sites
- Pseudophichthys17 sites
- Sphyraena17 sites
- Squatina17 sites
- Trachinus17 sites
- Ceratoscopelus maderensis16 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 285 sites for Sparidae, and this reads 240 of them. Of that, one read hit the database's own return limit, so every count below is a floor rather than a total. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too. The 24 sharing the most are listed.
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
193 references- Vertébrés (crocodiliens, poissons) du Miocène marin de l'Argarve occidentale43
- Les otolithes des téléostéens de l'oligo-miocène Belge23
- Fish otoliths from the Middle Miocene of Kienberg at Mikulov, Czech REpublic, Vienna Basin: Their paleoenvironmental and paleogeographic significance16
- Les Poissons fossiles d'Oran16
- The Zanclean marine fish fauna and palaeoenvironmental reconstruction of a coastal marine setting in the eastern Mediterranean15
- Early Pliocene fishes (Chondrichthyes, Osteichthyes) from Gran Canaria and Fuerteventura (Canary Islands, Spain)13
- Middle Miocene (Badenian) fishes from the north-west of the Fore-Carpathian Basin12
- Pleistocene marine fish invasions and paleoenvironmental reconstructions in the eastern Mediterranean12
- Fish teeth from the Middle Miocene of Kienberg at Mikulov, Czech Republic, Vienna Basin11
- Middle and late Eocene fish otoliths from the eastern and southern USA10
- Nuevas localidades con fauna ictiológica para el Neógeno menorquín9
- Fish otoliths from the pre-evaporitic (Early Messinian) sediments of northern Italy: their stratigraphic and palaeobiogeographic significance8
Each of the 565 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. 181 further references are not listed. Entries link to doi.org where the Paleobiology Database holds an identifier, and to its own record where it does not. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Sparidae
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Amada44
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Sparidae 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
- Source
- Wikipedia, “Sparidae”
- 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 itPerciformes through timeFormations of the MioceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Bonaparte 1832