Holospira
Holospira is a genus of air-breathing land snails, terrestrial pulmonate gastropod molluscs in the family Urocoptidae.

Henry Augustus Pilsbry (1862-1957) · Public Domain · 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
- UrocoptidaePBDB
- Life habit
- epifaunalPBDB, for Gastropoda
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Gastropoda
- Vision
- limitedPBDB, for Gastropoda
Time the record covers
At least 38 million years on record.
The record covers at least 66 Mya to 27.3 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 72.2 Mya to 23.04 Mya.
11 occurrences of Holospira on record, most of them in the Eocene. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group, and the chart stops with its fossils rather than at the present. 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
11 occurrences- Late Cretaceous9%
- Paleocene9%
- Eocene55%
- Oligocene27%
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
- Willwood Formation4
- Bridger Formation2
- Mexcala Formation1
- Kincaid Formation · Midway Group1
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The named rock units Holospira has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 3 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Holospira and its relatives
EoceneWhere Holospira and its relatives were recorded in the Eocene.
Found in the same rock
358 taxa- Copecion davisi4 sites
- Crocodylia4 sites
- Lepisosteus4 sites
- Allognathosuchus3 sites
- Calyptraphorus2 sites
- Chamelea2 sites
- Coryphodon eocaenus2 sites
- Dunnophis microechinis2 sites
- Ectocion parvus2 sites
- Hyopsodus lepidus2 sites
- Melanosaurus maximus2 sites
- Nuculana2 sites
- Oliva ? mississippiensis santander2 sites
- Olivella2 sites
- Opalia (Opalia)2 sites
- Orohippus2 sites
- Paramyidae2 sites
- Paramys taurus2 sites
- Planorbina2 sites
- Prototomus deimos2 sites
- Sciuravus nitidus2 sites
- Sifrhippus index2 sites
- Sinum mississippiense2 sites
- Terebra (Strioterebrum) tantula2 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 11 sites for Holospira, 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
5 references- New earliest Wasatchian mammalian fauna from the Eocene of northwestern Wyoming: composition and diversity in a rarely sampled high-floodplain assemblage4
- Mollusca of the Tertiary formations of Northeastern Mexico3
- Notes on Eocene Mammalia and Mollusca from Tabernacle Butte, Wyoming2
- Resilience of marine invertebrate communities during the early Cenozoic hyperthermals1
- Early Maastrictian mollusca from the Mexcala formation of the state of Guererro, southern Mexico1
Each of the 11 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 Holospira
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Henry Augustus Pilsbry (1862-1957)
- Licence
- Public Domain
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Holospira 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.
The description on this site
- Source
- Wikipedia, “Holospira”
- 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 itUrocoptidae through timeFormations of the EoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Martens 1860