Cosmetodon

Yale Peabody Museum · CC0 · via GBIF. 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
- ParallelodontidaePBDB
- Diet
- suspension feederPBDB, for Parallelodontidae
- Life habit
- low-level epifaunalPBDB, for Parallelodontidae
- Motility
- facultatively mobile, attachedPBDB, for Parallelodontidae
- Vision
- blindPBDB, for Bivalvia
Time the record covers
At least 217 million years on record.
The record covers at least 283.3 Mya to 66 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 290.1 Mya to 61.66 Mya.
205 occurrences of Cosmetodon on record, most of them in the Late Jurassic. 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
205 occurrences- Permian17%
- Late Triassic4%
- Early Jurassic9%
- Middle Jurassic10%
- Late Jurassic27%
- Early Cretaceous3%
- Late Cretaceous6%
- Paleocene25%
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
48 formations
- Jagüel Formation · Malargüe Group59
- Kap Leslie Formation36
- Chari Formation7
- Loray Formation6
- Nayband Formation6
- Kehalia Formation5
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The named rock units Cosmetodon has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 24 further formations hold fewer occurrences each and are not listed. 27 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Cosmetodon and its relatives
Late JurassicWhere Cosmetodon and its relatives were recorded in the Late Jurassic.
Found in the same rock
1,425 taxa- Grammatodon (Cosmetodon) keyserlingii41 sites
- Isognomon32 sites
- Entolium orbiculare29 sites
- Camptonectes28 sites
- Pleuromya27 sites
- Taimyrothyris27 sites
- Liostrea25 sites
- Astarte23 sites
- Grammatodon23 sites
- Buchia mosquensis21 sites
- Grammatodon (Cosmetodon) politus21 sites
- Pinna20 sites
- Ammonoidea19 sites
- Plagiostoma19 sites
- Modiolus16 sites
- Pleuromya uniformis16 sites
- Belemnitida15 sites
- Isocyprina15 sites
- Protocardia15 sites
- Hartwellia14 sites
- Protocardia striatula13 sites
- Serpula intestinalis13 sites
- Gastropoda11 sites
- Grammatodon (Grammatodon)11 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 131 sites for Cosmetodon, 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
40 references- Molluscs at the K/Pg boundary in Argentina: Extinction and recovery patterns. unpublished Ph.D. thesis60
- Unpublished data21
- Genesis and environmental significance of Upper Cretaceous shell concentrations from the Cauvery Basin, southern India19
- A systematic survey of the Mesozoic Bivalvia from Japan12
- Unpublished data from Kachchh9
- Brachiopods and mollusca of the Lower Permian Arcturus Group, Nevada and Utah, Part 1: brachiopods, scaphopods, rostroconchs, and bivalves9
- Jurassic bivalves of Gebel Maghara, North Sinai, Egypt6
- Palökologie benthischer Faunen aus dem Unter-Toarc SW-Europas6
- Die Muschelfauna der Nayband-Formation (Obertrias, Nor - Rhät) des östlichen Zentraliran6
- Yao et al., 19805
- Isotopic and faunal record of high paleotemperatures in the Kimmeridgian of Subpolar Urals4
- Bivalves from the upper part of the Permian in southern Hunan, China4
Each of the 205 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. 28 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 Cosmetodon
- Source
- GBIF
- Credit
- Yale Peabody Museum
- Licence
- CC0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Cosmetodon 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 itParallelodontidae through timeFormations of the Late JurassicThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Branson 1942)