Yoldia
Yoldia is a genus of marine bivalve mollusks in the family Yoldiidae. Some former members of the genus are now known as Portlandia. The genus was named after Alfonso de Aguirre y Yoldi, Conde de Yoldi (1764–1852), a Spanish nobleman in charge of the royal naturalistic collection of Denmark.

Eric A. Lazo-Wasem · CC0 · 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
- YoldiidaePBDB
- Diet
- deposit feederPBDB
- Life habit
- infaunalPBDB
- Motility
- facultatively mobilePBDB
- Vision
- blindPBDB, for Bivalvia
- Environment
- inner shelf,outer shelf,oceanicPBDB, for Yoldiidae
Time the record covers
At least 335 million years on record.
The record covers at least 335.4 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 358.86 Mya to 0 Mya.
779 occurrences of Yoldia 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
779 occurrences- Carboniferousunder 1%
- Permianunder 1%
- Early Cretaceous1%
- Late Cretaceous8%
- Paleocene2%
- Eocene9%
- Oligocene27%
- Miocene30%
- Pliocene9%
- Pleistocene12%
- Holoceneunder 1%
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
223 formations
- Byram Formation · Vicksburg Group30
- Woodbine Formation24
- Amaninskaya Formation16
- Norwich Crag Formation · Crag Group16
- Shoal River Formation · Alum Bluff Group15
- Gakkhinskaya Formation15
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The named rock units Yoldia has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 199 further formations hold fewer occurrences each and are not listed. 117 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Yoldia and its relatives
MioceneWhere Yoldia and its relatives were recorded in the Miocene.
Found in the same rock
2,834 taxa- Nuculana48 sites
- Cyclocardia40 sites
- Nucula32 sites
- Anadara31 sites
- Limopsis31 sites
- Diplodonta30 sites
- Dentalium29 sites
- Ostrea29 sites
- Tellina29 sites
- Anomia28 sites
- Turritella28 sites
- Varicorbula gibba28 sites
- Hiatella arctica25 sites
- Scapharca (Scapharca) diluvii25 sites
- Macoma24 sites
- Chlamys23 sites
- Limopsis (Limopsis) aurita23 sites
- Parvicardium22 sites
- Parvilucina22 sites
- Pitar22 sites
- Venus (Ventricoloidea) multilamella22 sites
- Astarte (Astarte) radiata21 sites
- Cadulus21 sites
- Gouldia (Gouldia) minima21 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 446 sites for Yoldia, 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
178 references- Neogene and Paleogene Molluscan (Bivalvia) Cenozones of the Russian Northeast.90
- Neogene and Paleogene Molluscan (Bivalvia) Cenozones of Sakhalin and Kurile Islands58
- Die Fauna des marinen Miozäns von Kevelaer (Niederrhein). Band 2 Bivalvia, Scaphopoda, Cephalopoda, Bryozoa, Annelida, Brachiopoda36
- Testing for patterns of faunal persistence in the early Oligocene Byram Formation of Mississippi26
- The Molluscan Fauna of the Alum Bluff Group of Florida26
- Larger invertebrate fossils of the Woodbine formation (Cenomanian) of Texas25
- Marine Molluscan Assemblages in the Early Pleistocene of Sidestrand, Bramerton and the Royal Society Borehole at Ludham, Norfolk22
- Paleogene molluscan faunas from the Kushiro Coal Field, Eastern Hokkaido21
- Catalogue of the Paleocene and Eocene mollusca of the southern and eastern United States. Part 1. Pelecypoda, Amphineura, Pteropoda, Scaphopoda and Cephalopoda20
- Lower Oligocene Bivalvia of the Vicksburg Group in Mississippi15
- Tertiary faunal horizons of western Washington15
- Unpublished census data from Atlantic coastal plain and circum-Caribbean Neogene assemblages and taxonomic opinions13
Each of the 779 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. 166 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 Yoldia
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Eric A. Lazo-Wasem
- Licence
- CC0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Yoldia 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, “Yoldia”
- 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 itYoldiidae through timeFormations of the MioceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Möller 1842)