Mylacanthus

Mylacanthus is an extinct genus of prehistoric coelacanth lobe-finned fish that lived during the Smithian age of the Early Triassic epoch in what is now Svalbard.

Mylacanthus

Printed under a CC BY license, with permission from Nadine Bösch and Beat Scheffold, original copyright [2013]. · CC BY 2.5 · 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
CoelacanthidaePBDB
Diet
carnivorePBDB, for Coelacanthidae
Life habit
nektobenthicPBDB, for Coelacanthidae
Motility
actively mobilePBDB, for Osteichthyes

Time the record covers

At most 2.2 million years on record.

Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 250.8 Mya and 248.6 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.

Early Triassic — about 5 of 5 occurrencesEarly Triassic251–251 Mya — about 0.1 occurrences251–251 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences251–251 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences251–250 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences250–250 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences250–250 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences250–250 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences250–250 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences250–250 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences250–250 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences250–250 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences250–250 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences250–249 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences249–249 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences249–249 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences249–249 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences249–249 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences249–249 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences249–249 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences249–249 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences249–249 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences249–249 Mya — about 0.1 occurrences251.3 Mya248.1 Mya

5 occurrences of Mylacanthus on record, most of them in the Early Triassic. 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

5 occurrences

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

1 formation

Kongressfjellet — 78.28°N, 17.63°EKongressfjellet — 78.25°N, 18.06°EKongressfjellet — 78.57°N, 15.32°EKongressfjellet — 78.24°N, 17.21°E

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The named rock units Mylacanthus has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed.

Mylacanthus and its relatives

Early Triassic

Where Mylacanthus and its relatives were recorded in the Early Triassic.

Found in the same rock

31 taxa

The Paleobiology Database records 4 sites for Mylacanthus, 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

1 reference

Each of the 5 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. Each entry links to doi.org. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.

Media and terms

Media content1

Picture of Mylacanthus

Credit
Printed under a CC BY license, with permission from Nadine Bösch and Beat Scheffold, original copyright [2013].
Licence
CC BY 2.5
Commercial use
the licence allows it

No 3D scan of Mylacanthus 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

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 itCoelacanthidae through timeFormations of the Early TriassicThe world it lived on

Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Stensiö 1921