Majoidea

Hans Hillewaert · CC BY-SA 4.0 · 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- Also called
- spider crabPBDB
- Sits inside
- HeterotremataPBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB, for Decapoda
- Life habit
- epifaunalPBDB, for Decapoda
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Malacostraca
- Vision
- well-developedPBDB, for Malacostraca
Time the record covers
At least 72 million years on record.
The record covers at least 72.2 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 83.6 Mya to 0 Mya.
280 occurrences of Majoidea on record, most of them in the Eocene. 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
280 occurrences- Late Cretaceous2%
- Paleoceneunder 1%
- Eocene26%
- Oligocene5%
- Miocene24%
- Pliocene8%
- Pleistocene23%
- Holocene12%
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
74 formations
- Coral Rock Formation14
- Castle Hayne Formation6
- Palos Verdes Sand Formation6
- San Pedro Formation5
- Sandakan Formation5
- Montpelier Formation · White Limestone Group5
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The named rock units Majoidea has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 50 further formations hold fewer occurrences each and are not listed. 126 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Majoidea and its relatives
EoceneWhere Majoidea and its relatives were recorded in the Eocene.
Found in the same rock
2,158 taxa- Pilumnus mediterraneus12 sites
- Xantho moldavicus11 sites
- Callianassa9 sites
- Pisa oroszyi9 sites
- Galathea weinfurteri8 sites
- Magyarcarcinus loczyanus8 sites
- Maja biaensis8 sites
- Mithrax verrucosus7 sites
- Brachynotus februarius6 sites
- Calappa praelata6 sites
- Daira speciosa6 sites
- Galenopsis similis6 sites
- Hiatella arctica6 sites
- Hyastenus6 sites
- Maja squinado6 sites
- Mithrax6 sites
- Pachygrapsus hungaricus6 sites
- Periacanthus horridus6 sites
- Bryozoa5 sites
- Calappa heberti5 sites
- Calappilia dacica5 sites
- Callianassa munieri5 sites
- Cancer productus5 sites
- Eocalcinus eocenicus5 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 151 sites for Majoidea, 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
104 references- Notes on North American Crustacea, in the Museum of the Smithsonian Institution. No. II29
- The fossil stalk-eyed Crustacea of the Pacific slope of North America19
- Tertiary and Pleistocene crabs from Barbados and Trinidad14
- Decapod crustacea of the Badenian13
- Fossil Crustacea of the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Plain9
- Miocene and Pleistocene Crabs (Crustacea, Decapoda) from Sabah and Sarawak6
- I crostacei Eocenici della Cava "Boschetto" di Nogarole Vicentino (VIcenza - Italia settentrionale6
- Spider crabs (Decapoda: Brachyura: Majoidea) from the upper Eocene of south Pyrenees (Huesca, Spain)5
- Fossil decapod crustaceans from the late Oligocene to early Miocene Pysht Formation and late Oligocene Quimper Sandstone, Olympic Peninsula, Washington5
- An Upper Pleistocene fauna from the Baldwin Hills, Los Angeles County, California5
- New occurrences of fossil Macrocheira (Brachyura, Inachidae) from the North Eastern Pacific4
- A new inachid crab (Brachyura, Majoidea) from the Middle Eocene of the provinces of Barcelona and Girona (Catalonia, Spain)4
Each of the 280 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. 92 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 content1

Picture of Majoidea
- Source
- Wikidata/Commons
- Credit
- Hans Hillewaert
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Majoidea 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.
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itHeterotremata through timeFormations of the EoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Samouelle 1819