Atherina boyeri
The big-scale sand smelt is a species of fish in the family Atherinidae. It is a euryhaline amphidromous fish, up to 20 cm in length.

Roberto Pillon · CC BY 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
- AtherinaPBDB
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Osteichthyes
Time the record covers
At least 4.5 million years on record.
The record covers at least 5.333 Mya to 774 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 7.246 Mya to 129 ka.
9 occurrences of Atherina boyeri on record. 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
9 occurrences- Miocene56%
- Pliocene11%
- Pleistocene33%
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 Atherina boyeri has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 6 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Found in the same rock
94 taxa- Gobius7 sites
- Aphanius crassicaudus5 sites
- Aphia5 sites
- Lesueurigobius5 sites
- Cepola4 sites
- Ceratoscopelus maderensis4 sites
- Deltentosteus4 sites
- Hygophum benoiti4 sites
- Diaphus holti3 sites
- Diaphus rafinesquii3 sites
- Diaphus taaningi3 sites
- Engraulis encrasicolus3 sites
- Gadiculus argenteus3 sites
- Gobius niger3 sites
- Grammonus ater3 sites
- Lobianchia dofleini3 sites
- Maurolicus muelleri3 sites
- Oblada3 sites
- Spratelloides gracilis3 sites
- Arnoglossus kokeni2 sites
- Benthosema glaciale2 sites
- Dentex2 sites
- Gaidropsarus2 sites
- Hygophum2 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 9 sites for Atherina boyeri, 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
4 references- Données récentes sur Les téléostéens du Miocène et du Pliocéne d'Italie4
- Pleistocene marine fish invasions and paleoenvironmental reconstructions in the eastern Mediterranean3
- Paleobathymetry of a Late Pliocene Voutes coast (Heraklion basin, Crete)1
- Fish otoliths from the Messinian of Strada degli Archi (Tuscany, Italy) – Taxonomy and palaeoecology1
Each of the 9 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 Atherina boyeri
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Roberto Pillon
- Licence
- CC BY 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Atherina boyeri 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 itAtherina through timeThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Risso 1810