Hiatella arctica
Hiatella arctica, known as the wrinkled rock-borer, the arctic hiatella or the arctic saxicave, is a species of saltwater clam, a marine bivalve mollusc in the family Hiatellidae. The white shell of this mollusc is thick and more or less rectangular, but generally irregular in shape. It is up to 45 mm (1.8 in) long.

Jan Johan ter Poorten; modified by Tom Meijer · 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
- wrinkled rock-borerPBDB
- Sits inside
- HiatellaPBDB
- Diet
- suspension feederPBDB, for Hiatella
- Life habit
- boringPBDB, for Hiatella
- Motility
- stationaryPBDB, for Hiatella
- Vision
- blindPBDB, for Bivalvia
Time the record covers
At least 27 million years on record.
The record covers at least 27.3 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 33.9 Mya to 0 Mya.
367 occurrences of Hiatella arctica on record, most of them in the Pleistocene. 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
367 occurrences- Oligocene3%
- Miocene20%
- Pliocene9%
- Pleistocene50%
- Holocene19%
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
64 formations
- Narrow Cape Formation13
- Presumpscot Formation9
- Norwich Crag Formation · Crag Group8
- Yorktown Formation7
- Lillo Formation7
- Narrrow Cape Formaton Formation6
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The named rock units Hiatella arctica has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 40 further formations hold fewer occurrences each and are not listed. 206 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Hiatella arctica and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Hiatella arctica and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
3,202 taxa- Mya (Mya) truncata36 sites
- Macoma (Macoma) calcarea27 sites
- Turritella25 sites
- Cyclocardia23 sites
- Limopsis23 sites
- Varicorbula gibba23 sites
- Gouldia (Gouldia) minima22 sites
- Parvicardium22 sites
- Aequipecten21 sites
- Mytilus edulis21 sites
- Nassarius21 sites
- Odostomia21 sites
- Lucinoma borealis20 sites
- Venus (Ventricoloidea) multilamella20 sites
- Macoma (Macoma) balthica19 sites
- Mitrella19 sites
- Calyptraea chinensis18 sites
- Limopsis (Limopsis) aurita18 sites
- Scapharca (Scapharca) diluvii18 sites
- Amalda obsoleta17 sites
- Balanus17 sites
- Elphidium17 sites
- Nucula (Nucula) nucleus17 sites
- Alvania16 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 192 sites for Hiatella arctica, and this reads all 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
93 references- Studies on the marine Pleistocene: Part II. The marine Pleistocene mollusks of eastern North America49
- Quaternary marine stratigraphy and geochronology in central West Greenland39
- Faunas of the Pleistocene Champlain Sea24
- Unpublished census data from Atlantic coastal plain and circum-Caribbean Neogene assemblages and taxonomic opinions21
- A late Oligocene or earliest Miocene molluscan fauna from Sitkinak Island, Alaska19
- Contributions to the Quaternary geology of northern West Greenland especially the raised marine deposits17
- Marine Molluscan Assemblages in the Early Pleistocene of Sidestrand, Bramerton and the Royal Society Borehole at Ludham, Norfolk15
- Die Fauna des marinen Miozäns von Kevelaer (Niederrhein). Band 2 Bivalvia, Scaphopoda, Cephalopoda, Bryozoa, Annelida, Brachiopoda13
- Late quaternary history of Washington land, North Greenland11
- The Neogene Bivalvia (Heterodonta and Anomalodesmata) and Scaphopoda from Kallo and Doel (Oost Vlaanderen, Belgium)9
- Stratigraphic interpretation of the Neogene marine-continental record in the Maaseik well (49W0220) in the Roer Valley Graben, NE Belgium6
- Molluscan palaeontology of the Pliocene-Pleistocene Kap Kobenhavn Formation, North Greenland6
Each of the 367 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. 81 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 Hiatella arctica
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Jan Johan ter Poorten; modified by Tom Meijer
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
CT scan
- Source
- MorphoSource
- Licence
- In Copyright
- Commercial use
- cannot be read from the licence given — check the record
- Specimen
- Hiatella arctica · FMNH:Invertebrate Zoology:194525
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 itHiatella through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Linnaeus 1767)