Cothurnocystis

Cothurnocystis is a genus of small enigmatic echinoderms that lived during the Ordovician. Individual animals had a flat boot-shaped body and a thin rod-shaped appendage that may be a stem, or analogous to a foot or a tail. Fossils of Cothurnocystis species have been found in Nevada, Scotland, Czech Republic, France and Morocco.

Cothurnocystis

Dwergenpaartje · 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
Sits inside
CothurnocystinaePBDB
Diet
suspension feederPBDB, for Cornuta
Life habit
epifaunalPBDB, for Cornuta
Motility
facultatively mobilePBDB, for Cornuta
Vision
blindPBDB, for Stylophora
Environment
marinePBDB, for Echinodermata

Time the record covers

At least 22 million years on record.

The record covers at least 471.3 Mya to 448.8 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 477.1 Mya to 445.2 Mya.

Ordovician — about 5 of 5 occurrencesOrdovician478–477 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences477–476 Mya — about 0.4 occurrences476–474 Mya — about 0.4 occurrences474–473 Mya — about 0.4 occurrences473–472 Mya — about 0.4 occurrences472–471 Mya — about 0.4 occurrences471–470 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences470–469 Mya — about 0.3 occurrences469–468 Mya — about 0.4 occurrences468–467 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences467–466 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences466–464 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences464–463 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences463–462 Mya — about 0.0 occurrences449–448 Mya — about 0.3 occurrences448–447 Mya — about 0.3 occurrences447–446 Mya — about 0.3 occurrences446–445 Mya — about 0.1 occurrences471.3 Mya448.8 Mya477.7 Mya444.6 Mya

5 occurrences of Cothurnocystis on record, most of them in the Ordovician. 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

5 occurrences

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

4 formations

Pontyfenni — 52.00°N, 5.00°WSarka — 50.00°N, 14.00°ESaint-Chinian — 43.44°N, 2.89°ESouth Threave — 55.29°N, 4.76°W

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The named rock units Cothurnocystis has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed.

Cothurnocystis and its relatives

Ordovician

Where Cothurnocystis and its relatives were recorded in the Ordovician.

Found in the same rock

298 taxa

The Paleobiology Database records 5 sites for Cothurnocystis, 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

Each of the 5 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 Cothurnocystis

Credit
Dwergenpaartje
Licence
CC BY-SA 3.0
Commercial use
the licence allows it

No 3D scan was found. Smithsonian Open Access, MorphoSource and Sketchfab were all searched.

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 itCothurnocystinae through timeFormations of the OrdovicianThe world it lived on

Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Bather 1913