Hydnophora

Ryan McMinds · CC BY 3.0 · via Wikidata/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
- MerulinidaePBDB
- Diet
- microcarnivore, photosymbioticPBDB, for Scleractinia
- Life habit
- intermediate-level epifaunal, colonial, clonalPBDB, for Scleractinia
- Motility
- stationary, attachedPBDB, for Scleractinia
- Vision
- blindPBDB, for Anthozoa
- Environment
- marinePBDB, for Scleractinia
Time the record covers
At least 119 million years on record.
The record covers at least 119.57 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 121.4 Mya to 0 Mya.
164 occurrences of Hydnophora 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
164 occurrences- Early Cretaceous7%
- Late Cretaceous12%
- Eocene2%
- Oligocene17%
- Miocene15%
- Pliocene6%
- Pleistocene36%
- Holocene6%
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
47 formations
- Castro Limestone Formation8
- Schrattenkalk Formation6
- Qom Formation4
- Riukiu Limestone Formation3
- Aldabra Limestone Formation3
- Molare Formation3
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The named rock units Hydnophora has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 23 further formations hold fewer occurrences each and are not listed. 83 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Hydnophora and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Hydnophora and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
1,072 taxa- Porites31 sites
- Goniopora23 sites
- Favites21 sites
- Favia20 sites
- Acropora17 sites
- Montastraea17 sites
- Stylophora17 sites
- Astreopora13 sites
- Leptoria phrygia12 sites
- Montipora12 sites
- Platygyra12 sites
- Actinacis11 sites
- Alveopora11 sites
- Caulastrea11 sites
- Galaxea fascicularis11 sites
- Goniastrea11 sites
- Diploastrea10 sites
- Dipsastraea pallida10 sites
- Dipsastraea speciosa10 sites
- Pavona10 sites
- Stylophora pistillata10 sites
- Cyphastrea serailia9 sites
- Goniastrea retiformis9 sites
- Leptoseris9 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 74 sites for Hydnophora, 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
83 references- Escaping the heat: range shifts of reef coral taxa in coastal Western Australia13
- Limited membership in Pleistocene reef coral assemblages from the Huon Peninsula, Papua New Guinea: constancy during global change8
- Geological and geographical distribution of reef-corals in Japan7
- Carbonate deposition in accretionary prism settings: Early Miocene coral limestones and corals of the Makran Mountain Range in southern Iran6
- High coral diversity is coupled with reef-building capacity during the Late Oligocene warming event (Castro Limestone, Salento Peninsula, S Italy)5
- Quaternary fossil coral communities in uplifted strata along the Balochistan coast of Pakistan: understanding modern coral decline in the Arabian Sea5
- Ecological stratification in the Pleistocene coral reefs of the Kenya coast5
- L'Oligocene e il Miocene della Somalia. Stratigrafia, Tettonica, Paleontologia (Macroforaminferi, Coralli, Molluschi)4
- Corals from a lower Pliocene patch reef in Central Java4
- Upper Barremian-lower Aptian scleractinian corals of central Europe (Schrattenkalk Fm., Helvetic Zone, Austria, Germany, Switzerland)3
- Evolutionary dynamics of Indo-Pacific reef corals throughout the Neogene3
- The Oligocene coral and red algae reef of Maddalena (Sassellino, Savona)3
Each of the 164 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. 71 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 Hydnophora
- Source
- Wikidata/Commons
- Credit
- Ryan McMinds
- Licence
- CC BY 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
3D model
- Source
- Sketchfab
- Licence
- CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
- Commercial use
- the licence does not allow it
Smithsonian Open Access was 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 itMerulinidae through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Fischer de Waldheim 1807