Alvania
Searched as Alvania montagui ampulla. The Paleobiology Database treats Alvania as the accepted name.
Alvania is a genus of minute sea snails, marine gastropod mollusks or micromollusks in the family Rissoidae.

Jan Delsing · Public Domain · 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
- RissoidaePBDB
- Diet
- grazerPBDB, for Rissoidae
- Life habit
- epifaunalPBDB, for Rissoidae
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Rissoidae
- Vision
- limitedPBDB, for Gastropoda
Time the record covers
At most 8.9 million years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 20.45 Mya and 11.63 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
2 occurrences of Alvania on record, most of them in the Miocene. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group, and the chart stops with its fossils rather than at the present. 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- Miocene100%
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
1 formation
Loading coastlines…
The named rock units Alvania has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 1 occurrence has no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Alvania and its relatives
MioceneWhere Alvania and its relatives were recorded in the Miocene.
Found in the same rock
2,114 taxa- Limopsis24 sites
- Parvicardium23 sites
- Varicorbula gibba23 sites
- Limopsis (Limopsis) aurita22 sites
- Lentigodentalium21 sites
- Reussirella21 sites
- Saccella westendorpi21 sites
- Yoldiella21 sites
- Astarte (Astarte) radiata20 sites
- Korobkovia20 sites
- Limopsis (Pectunculina) lamellata20 sites
- Lunulites20 sites
- Scapharca (Scapharca) diluvii20 sites
- Venus (Ventricoloidea) multilamella20 sites
- Yoldia (Yoldia) glaberrima20 sites
- Dentalium (Pseudantilis)19 sites
- Gouldia (Gouldia) minima19 sites
- Nuculoma18 sites
- Pseudamussium lilli18 sites
- Cyclocardia17 sites
- Aequipecten16 sites
- Cerithiopsis16 sites
- Habecardium16 sites
- Gadila15 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 116 sites for Alvania, and this reads all 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
2 references- Computer-based mollusc stratigraphy - a case study from the Eggenburgian (Lower Miocene) type region (NE Austria)1
- Paleoecology and lithogenesis of the Middle Miocene (Badenian) algal-vermetid reefs from the Roztocze Hills, south-eastern Poland1
Each 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. 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 Alvania
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Jan Delsing
- Licence
- Public Domain
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Alvania was found in MorphoSource and Sketchfab.
Smithsonian Open Access was 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, “Alvania”
- 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 itRissoidae through timeFormations of the MioceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Risso 1826)