Conidae
Cone snails, or cones, are highly venomous sea snails that constitute the family Conidae. Conidae is a taxonomic family of predatory marine gastropod molluscs in the superfamily Conoidea.

Pet · CC BY-SA 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- Also called
- cone shellPBDB
- Sits inside
- ConoideaPBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB
- Life habit
- epifaunalPBDB
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB
- Vision
- limitedPBDB, for Gastropoda
Time the record covers
At least 100 million years on record.
The record covers at least 100.5 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 113.2 Mya to 0 Mya.
3,309 occurrences of Conidae on record, most of them in the Miocene. 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
3,309 occurrences- Early Cretaceousunder 1%
- Late Cretaceousunder 1%
- Paleoceneunder 1%
- Eocene14%
- Oligocene4%
- Miocene46%
- Pliocene16%
- Pleistocene19%
- Holoceneunder 1%
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
378 formations
- Chipola Formation · Alum Bluff Group295
- Gatun Formation167
- Gurabo Formation132
- Waimanalo Formation72
- Cook Mountain Formation · Claiborne Group63
- Termofourà Formation56
Loading coastlines…
The named rock units Conidae has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 354 further formations hold fewer occurrences each and are not listed. 672 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Conidae and its relatives
MioceneWhere Conidae and its relatives were recorded in the Miocene.
Found in the same rock
3,228 taxa- Turritella56 sites
- Conus45 sites
- Chlamys37 sites
- Ficus35 sites
- Anadara32 sites
- Ostrea32 sites
- Conus sauridens31 sites
- Dentalium31 sites
- Microdrillia31 sites
- Architectonica28 sites
- Cadulus26 sites
- Athleta petrosa23 sites
- Naticidae23 sites
- Calyptraea (Trochita) aperta22 sites
- Pyramidella22 sites
- Sinum22 sites
- Terebra22 sites
- Clavilithes21 sites
- Corbula21 sites
- Levifusus mortoniopsis20 sites
- Marginella20 sites
- Nucula20 sites
- Nuculana20 sites
- Retusa galba20 sites
The Paleobiology Database records at least 1,028 sites for Conidae, 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
475 references- The genus Conus (Mollusca: Gastropoda) from the Alum Bluff Group of northwestern Florida275
- Unpublished census data from Atlantic coastal plain and circum-Caribbean Neogene assemblages and taxonomic opinions180
- Geology and paleontology of canal zone and adjoing parts of Panama: Description of Tertiary mollusks (gastropods: Eulimidae, Marginellidae to Helminthoglyptidae).123
- Lower to Middle Miocene Mollusc assemblages from the Torino Hills (NW Italy): Synthesis of new data and chronostratigraphical arrangement87
- Skwarko, 199476
- Fossil mollusks of Oahu, Hawaii Islands71
- Resilience of marine invertebrate communities during the early Cenozoic hyperthermals69
- Neogene molluscs, shallow marine paleoenvironments, and chronostratigraphy of the Guajira Peninsula, Colombia67
- Petuch and Roberts, 200754
- Cenozoic fossil mollusks from Western Pacific Islands; Gastropods (Volutidae through Terebridae)51
- Unpublished notes on Caribbean collection of the Naturhistorisches Museum Basel50
- Glowing Seashells: Diversity of Fossilized Coloration Patterns on Coral Reef-Associated Cone Snail (Gastropoda: Conidae) Shells from the Neogene of the Dominican Republic48
Each of the 3,309 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. 463 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 Conidae
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Pet
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
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, “Cone snail”
- 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 itConoidea through timeFormations of the MioceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Fleming 1822