Acanthina
Searched as Acanthina muricata tuberculata. The Paleobiology Database treats Acanthina as the accepted name.
Acanthina, common name the unicorn snails, is a genus of small predatory sea snails, marine gastropod mollusks in the family Muricidae, the murex snails or rock snails.

Pallas, 1774 · 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- Also called
- unicornPBDB
- Sits inside
- OcenebrinaePBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB, for Muricidae
- Life habit
- epifaunalPBDB, for Muricidae
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Muricidae
- Vision
- limitedPBDB, for Gastropoda
Time the record covers
At most 118 thousand years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 129 ka and 11.7 ka, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
2 occurrences of Acanthina on record, most of them in the Pleistocene. 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
2 occurrences- Pleistocene100%
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.
Acanthina and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Acanthina and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
707 taxa- Balanus11 sites
- Chorus8 sites
- Cryptomya californica8 sites
- Caesia fossatus7 sites
- Callianax biplicata7 sites
- Glossaulax reclusiana7 sites
- Lottia insessa7 sites
- Thylacodes squamigerus7 sites
- Alia carinata6 sites
- Antisabia panamensis6 sites
- Californiconus californicus6 sites
- Chlamys6 sites
- Crepidula nummaria6 sites
- Hirtoscala tincta6 sites
- Leukoma staminea6 sites
- Littorina (Littorina) scutulata6 sites
- Acmaea mitra5 sites
- Cerithiopsis5 sites
- Chama exogyra5 sites
- Chione californiensis5 sites
- Chlorostoma funebrale5 sites
- Concholepas kieneri5 sites
- Crepipatella lingulata5 sites
- Dendropoma lituella5 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 64 sites for Acanthina, and this reads all of them. 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
1 referenceEach of the 2 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 the Paleobiology Database's own record for the work.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Acanthina
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Pallas, 1774
- Licence
- CC0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Acanthina 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, “Acanthina”
- 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 itOcenebrinae through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Fischer de Waldheim 1807)