Oamaruia
Oamaruia is a genus of sea snails, marine gastropod mollusks in the family Cancellariidae, the nutmeg snails.

Unknown · CC BY 4.0 · via GBIF. 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
- CancellariinaePBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB, for Cancellariidae
- Life habit
- epifaunalPBDB, for Cancellariidae
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Cancellariidae
- Vision
- limitedPBDB, for Gastropoda
Time the record covers
At least 14 million years on record.
The record covers at least 27.3 Mya to 13.05 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 33.9 Mya to 11.04 Mya.
8 occurrences of Oamaruia on record, most of them in the Miocene. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group, and the chart stops with its fossils rather than at the present. 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
8 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
6 formations
- Monte Leon Fm Formation3
- San Julian Formation1
- Stillwater Mudstone Formation · Blue Bottom Group1
- Rifle Butts Formation · Kaierero Group1
- Glen Aire Clay Formation1
- Chenque Formation1
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The named rock units Oamaruia has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed.
Oamaruia and its relatives
MioceneWhere Oamaruia and its relatives were recorded in the Miocene.
Found in the same rock
113 taxa- ? Tricosirius patagonica1 site
- Ameghinomya argentina1 site
- Ameghinomya darwini1 site
- Ameghinomya meridionalis1 site
- Antimelatoma1 site
- Arca1 site
- Arca (Arca) patagonica1 site
- Ataxocerithium1 site
- Atrina magellanica1 site
- Aulacomya atra1 site
- Austroimbricaria1 site
- Austroimbricaria quemadensis1 site
- Austromitra1 site
- Borsonia1 site
- Calliostoma1 site
- Calyptraea1 site
- Calyptraea pileus1 site
- Cardium1 site
- Cardium pisum1 site
- Chione casa1 site
- Chione eupyga1 site
- Chione patagonica1 site
- Chlamys1 site
- Chlamys (Swiftopecten) iheringii1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 1 site for Oamaruia, 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
4 references- Tertiary Marine Molluscan Assemblages of Eastern Patagonia (Argentina): A Biostratigraphic Analysis5
- Late Miocene Deep-Water Mollusca from the Stillwater Mudstone at Greymouth, Westland, New Zealand: Paleoecology and Systematics1
- Molluscan biogeography and biostratigraphy of the Tertiary of southeastern Australia1
- The Geology of the Waitaki Subdivision1
Each of the 8 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 Oamaruia
- Source
- GBIF
- Credit
- Unknown
- Licence
- CC BY 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Oamaruia was found in MorphoSource and Sketchfab.
Smithsonian Open Access was 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, “Oamaruia”
- 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 itCancellariinae through timeFormations of the MioceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Finlay 1924