Ctenophora

Uncredited · 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.

Also called

comb jellyPBDB

Sits inside

TriploblasticaPBDB

Diet

carnivorePBDB

Life habit

nektonicPBDB

Motility

actively mobilePBDB

• Cambrian67%
• Oligocene33%

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.

Where Ctenophora and its relatives were recorded in the Cambrian. Draw the map

• Hazelia10 sites
• Choia9 sites
• Lingulella9 sites
• Selkirkia9 sites
• Arthropoda8 sites
• Crumillospongia8 sites
• Isoxys8 sites
• Hurdia7 sites
• Liangshanella7 sites
• Naraoia7 sites
• Porifera7 sites
• Algae6 sites
• Burgessia6 sites
• Dinomischus6 sites
• Halichondrites6 sites
• Laggania6 sites
• Mollisonia6 sites
• Naraoia compacta6 sites
• Perspicaris6 sites
• Sidneyia6 sites
• Acrothyra5 sites
• Alalcomenaeus cambricus5 sites
• Branchiocaris5 sites
• Canadaspis perfecta5 sites

The Paleobiology Database records 27 sites for Ctenophora, 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.

• Fossile Insekten aus der Rheinischen BraunkhohleVon Heyden, 1859 · Palaeontographica · journal article2
• A Cambrian soft-bodied biota after the first Phanerozoic mass extinctionZeng et al., 2026 · Nature · journal article1
• The diverse radiodont fauna from the Marjum Formation of Utah, USA (Cambrian: Drumian)Pates et al., 2021 · PeerJ · journal article1
• The Qingjiang biota - A Burgess Shale-type fossil Lagerstätte from the early Cambrian of South ChinaFu et al., 2019 · Science · journal article1
• A new phyllopod bed-like assemblage from the Burgess Shale of the Canadian RockiesCaron et al., 2014 · Nature Communications · journal article1

Each of the 6 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.

What may have been alongside itTriploblastica through timeFormations of the CambrianThe world it lived on

Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Eschscholtz 1829