Menippe
Menippe is a genus of true crabs. One of the best known species is the Florida stone crab. Most of the species of this genus are found in the Atlantic Ocean.

Andrea Westmoreland from DeLand, United States · CC BY-SA 2.0 · 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- Sits inside
- MenippidaePBDB
- 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 93 million years on record.
The record covers at least 93.9 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 100.5 Mya to 0 Mya.
28 occurrences of Menippe 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
28 occurrences- Late Cretaceous11%
- Eocene32%
- Miocene29%
- Pliocene18%
- Pleistocene4%
- Holocene7%
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
13 formations
- Santee Limestone Formation4
- Choctawhatchee Formation4
- Jackson Formation3
- Ndalithoni Limestone Formation2
- Prairie Bluff Formation · Selma Group2
- Ndalithoni Formation2
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The named rock units Menippe has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 4 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Menippe and its relatives
EoceneWhere Menippe and its relatives were recorded in the Eocene.
Found in the same rock
215 taxa- Chlamys7 sites
- Chama6 sites
- Turritella6 sites
- Cidaris pratti5 sites
- Crassatella5 sites
- Crassatella texalta5 sites
- Eburneopecten scintillatus5 sites
- Ostrea5 sites
- Pitar5 sites
- Recurvaster5 sites
- Solena5 sites
- Strombus5 sites
- Venericardia5 sites
- Barbatia (Plagiarca) rhomboidella4 sites
- Cardiidae4 sites
- Conus4 sites
- Cubitostrea4 sites
- Cypraea4 sites
- Endopachys4 sites
- Ficus4 sites
- Marginella4 sites
- Modiolus4 sites
- Plicatula filamentosa4 sites
- Protoscutella conradi4 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 8 sites for Menippe, 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
8 references- Fossil Crustacea of the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Plain12
- Eocene biostratigraphy of South Carolina and its relationship to Gulf Coastal Plain zonations and global changes of coastal onlap5
- Geology of Lau, Fiji3
- Decapod Crustacea3
- Notes on North American Crustacea2
- Mesopristis nov. gen. osonensis nov. sp., nuevo género y especie de pez-sierra del Eoceno de Vic, (Catalunya, NE. de España)1
- Fabric of the Cretaceous-Tertiary Marine Macrofaunal Transition at Braggs, Alabama1
- The fossil decapod Crustacea of New Zealand and the evolution of the Order Decapoda1
Each of the 28 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 Menippe
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Andrea Westmoreland from DeLand, United States
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 2.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan was found. Smithsonian Open Access, MorphoSource and Sketchfab were all searched.
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 itMenippidae through timeFormations of the EoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. De Haan 1833