Brachidontes

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- Sits inside
- MytilinaePBDB
- Diet
- suspension feederPBDB
- Life habit
- epifaunalPBDB
- Motility
- stationary, attachedPBDB
- Vision
- blindPBDB, for Bivalvia
- Environment
- lagoonal,coastal,inner shelf,outer shelf,oceanic,brackish,freshwaterPBDB, for Mytilidae
Time the record covers
At least 199 million years on record.
The record covers at least 199.5 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 201.4 Mya to 0 Mya.
503 occurrences of Brachidontes on record, most of them in the Eocene. 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
503 occurrences- Early Jurassicunder 1%
- Middle Jurassic3%
- Late Jurassicunder 1%
- Early Cretaceous3%
- Late Cretaceous26%
- Paleocene10%
- Eocene31%
- Oligocene3%
- Miocene5%
- Pliocene4%
- Pleistocene12%
- Holocene2%
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
156 formations
- Woodbine Formation59
- Shuqra Formation12
- Meganos Formation10
- Aquia Formation · Pamunkey Group10
- Cowlitz Formation9
- Llajas Formation9
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The named rock units Brachidontes has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 132 further formations hold fewer occurrences each and are not listed. 78 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Brachidontes and its relatives
EoceneWhere Brachidontes and its relatives were recorded in the Eocene.
Found in the same rock
3,906 taxa- Ostrea37 sites
- Anomia34 sites
- Ostrea soleniscus31 sites
- Turritella31 sites
- Caryocorbula29 sites
- Barbatia27 sites
- Protarca27 sites
- Sanoarca grandis26 sites
- Cymbophora25 sites
- Nucula24 sites
- Voysa24 sites
- Dentalium23 sites
- Cuspidaria21 sites
- Tellina21 sites
- Nuculana20 sites
- Ursirivus20 sites
- Corbula19 sites
- Pholadomya19 sites
- Pitar19 sites
- Limopsis18 sites
- Glycymeris17 sites
- Modiolus17 sites
- Serpula17 sites
- Crassatella16 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 347 sites for Brachidontes, 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
159 references- Larger invertebrate fossils of the Woodbine formation (Cenomanian) of Texas62
- Catalogue of the Paleocene and Eocene mollusca of the southern and eastern United States. Part 1. Pelecypoda, Amphineura, Pteropoda, Scaphopoda and Cephalopoda30
- Unpublished data on Cretaceous-Paleocene molluscan assemblages18
- Geologic Map and Database of the Roseburg 30 x 60' Quadrangle, Douglas and Coos Counties, Oregon12
- The Jurassic and Lower Cretaceous of Wadi Hajar, southern Yemen12
- Miocene and Pliocene mollusks from Trinidad12
- Depositional dynamics and the record of ecosystem stability: early Eocene faunal gradients in the Pyrenean foreland, Spain11
- Resilience of marine invertebrate communities during the early Cenozoic hyperthermals10
- The geology and paleontology of the type section of the Meganos Formation (lower Middle Eocene) of California10
- Megapaleontology of the Eocene Llajas Formation, Simi Valley, California9
- Stratigraphy and fossil bivalve assemblages of the mid-Cretaceous Goshoura Group, southwest Japan8
- Geology of the Northern Santa Ana Mountains, California8
Each of the 503 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. 147 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 content2

Picture of Brachidontes
- 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
CT scan
- Source
- MorphoSource
- Licence
- In Copyright
- Commercial use
- cannot be read from the licence given — check the record
- Specimen
- Brachidontes exustus · FMNH:Invertebrate Zoology:188293
Smithsonian Open Access was 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 itMytilinae through timeFormations of the EoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Swainson 1840)