Blarina

Uncredited · via Wikidata/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
- American short-tailed shrewPBDB
- Sits inside
- BlarininiPBDB
- Diet
- omnivorePBDB, for Soricidae
- Life habit
- ground dwellingPBDB, for Soricidae
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Osteichthyes
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Eutheria
Time the record covers
At least 1.7 million years on record.
The record covers at least 1.8 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 4.7 Mya to 0 Mya.
86 occurrences of Blarina 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
86 occurrences- Pliocene3%
- Pleistocene94%
- 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
9 formations
- Kingsdown Formation4
- Sappa Formation1
- Crooked Creek Formation1
- Tule Formation1
- Caloosahatchee Formation1
- Good Creek Formation1
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The named rock units Blarina has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 74 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Blarina and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Blarina and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
1,005 taxa- Peromyscus39 sites
- Odocoileus virginianus38 sites
- Microtus pennsylvanicus34 sites
- Neotoma floridana34 sites
- Equus33 sites
- Scalopus aquaticus31 sites
- Sylvilagus30 sites
- Procyon lotor29 sites
- Ondatra zibethicus25 sites
- Synaptomys cooperi25 sites
- Dasypus bellus23 sites
- Myotis23 sites
- Geomys21 sites
- Marmota monax21 sites
- Sorex21 sites
- Sorex cinereus21 sites
- Cryptotis parva20 sites
- Spermophilus tridecemlineatus20 sites
- Castor canadensis19 sites
- Eptesicus fuscus19 sites
- Erethizon dorsatum19 sites
- Microtus19 sites
- Mephitis mephitis18 sites
- Microtus pinetorum18 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 79 sites for Blarina, 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
43 references- Phylogeny and Paleobiogeography of Short-tailed Shrews (Genus Blarina)14
- A late Pleistocene and early Holocene mammalian fauna from Little Beaver Cave, Central Ozarks, Missouri.13
- Synonymies and reidentifications of North American fossil mammals5
- Small mammals (Insectivora, Lagomorpha, and Rodentia) from the early Pleistocene (early Irvingtonian) Leisey Shell Pit Local Fauna, Hillsborough County, Florida5
- Paleontology and historic field trip of the John Guilday Cave Preserve (Trout Rock)4
- Historical Biogeography of Florida Pleistocene Mammals3
- Ecological Significance of Displaced Boreal Mammals in West Virginia Caves3
- Pleistocene (Rancholabrean) vertebrate faunas from coastal Georgia2
- Eshelman and Hager, 19842
- The Pleistocene vertebrate fauna from Cumberland Cave, Maryland2
- Middle Pleistocene (early Rancholabrean) vertebrates and associated marine and non-marine invertebrates from Oldsmar, Pinnellas County, Florida1
- A biota associated with Matuyama-age sediments in west-central Illinois1
Each of the 86 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. 31 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 Blarina
- Source
- Wikidata/Commons
- Credit
- nobody named on the record
- Licence
- not stated by the source
- Commercial use
- cannot be read from the licence given — check the record
No 3D scan of Blarina 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.
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itBlarinini through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Gray 1838