Melanella
Melanella is a genus of very small ectoparasitic sea snails, marine gastropod molluscs or micromolluscs in the family Eulimidae.

Jan Delsing · 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
- EulimidaePBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB, for Eulimidae
- Life habit
- epifaunalPBDB, for Eulimidae
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Eulimidae
- Vision
- limitedPBDB, for Gastropoda
Time the record covers
At least 61 million years on record.
The record covers at least 61.66 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 66 Mya to 0 Mya.
186 occurrences of Melanella 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
186 occurrencesThese 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
- Reklaw Formation · Claiborne Group11
- Moodys Branch Formation · Jackson Group10
- Cook Mountain Formation · Claiborne Group10
- James City Formation8
- Korytnica Clays Formation6
- Selsey Formation · Bracklesham Group5
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The named rock units Melanella 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. 36 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Melanella and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Melanella and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
2,446 taxa- Odostomia20 sites
- Turbonilla17 sites
- Cerithiopsis15 sites
- Dentalium15 sites
- Nuculana14 sites
- Nucula13 sites
- Tellina13 sites
- Turricula13 sites
- Turritella13 sites
- Ostrea12 sites
- Architectonica11 sites
- Nucula (Nucula) proxima11 sites
- Barbatia10 sites
- Bittium10 sites
- Chlamys10 sites
- Crepidula plana10 sites
- Gemmula10 sites
- Modiolus10 sites
- Acteon9 sites
- Cadulus9 sites
- Corbula9 sites
- Eopleurotoma9 sites
- Teinostoma9 sites
- Abra aequalis8 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 126 sites for Melanella, 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
94 references- Resilience of marine invertebrate communities during the early Cenozoic hyperthermals17
- Unpublished census data from Atlantic coastal plain and circum-Caribbean Neogene assemblages and taxonomic opinions6
- Middle Miocene (Badenian) gastropods from Korytnica, Poland; Part II6
- The Selandian (Paleocene) mollusc fauna from Copenhagen, Denmark: the Poul Harder 1920 collection5
- The Molluscan Macrofauna of the Reklaw Formation, Marquez Member (Eocene: Lower Claibornian), in Texas5
- Distribution of Mollusca in Units S1 to S9 of the Selsey Formation (middle Lutetian), Selsey Peninsula, West Sussex5
- Invertebrate Macropaleontolgy of the Clarke County Mississippi Area5
- The Pleistocene molluscan fauna from Leisley Shell Pit 1, Hillsborough County, Florida4
- Checklist of megafossils from the James City Formation (Lower Pleistocene) at Johnson Point, Craven County, North Carolina4
- Fossil assemblages of a marine transgressive sand, Moody''s Branch Formation (Upper Eocene), Louisiana and Mississippi4
- Geology of San Nicolas Island, California4
- Neogene Biostratigraphy of the Charlotte Harbor Area in Southwestern Florida4
Each of the 186 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. 82 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 Melanella
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Jan Delsing
- Licence
- Public Domain
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Melanella 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, “Melanella”
- 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 itEulimidae through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Bowdich 1822