Phocoena
Phocoena is a genus of porpoises with four extant species.
AVampireTear · CC BY-SA 3.0 · 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
- PhocoenidaePBDB
- Diet
- piscivorePBDB, for Phocoenidae
- Life habit
- aquatic, depth=surfacePBDB, for Cetacea
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Cetacea
- Environment
- marine,freshwaterPBDB, for Odontoceti
Time the record covers
At least 3.5 million years on record.
The record covers at least 3.6 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 5.333 Mya to 0 Mya.
37 occurrences of Phocoena on record. 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
37 occurrences- Pliocene14%
- Pleistocene5%
- Holocene81%
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
4 formations
- Cromer Forest Bed Formation1
- Purisima Formation1
- Goose Creek Limestone Formation1
- Goose Creek Formation1
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The named rock units Phocoena has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 33 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Found in the same rock
99 taxa- Callorhinus ursinus6 sites
- Enhydra lutris6 sites
- Phoca vitulina6 sites
- Eumetopias jubatus5 sites
- Phocoenoides dalli5 sites
- Orcinus orca3 sites
- Physeter macrocephalus3 sites
- Tursiops truncatus3 sites
- Cetacea2 sites
- Delphinapterus leucas2 sites
- Delphinidae2 sites
- Delphinus delphis2 sites
- Erignathus barbatus2 sites
- Eubalaena glacialis2 sites
- Homo sapiens2 sites
- Monodon monoceros2 sites
- Pusa hispida2 sites
- Sagmatias obliquidens2 sites
- Sus scrofa2 sites
- Ursus maritimus2 sites
- Acipenser1 site
- Alces alces1 site
- Alcidae1 site
- Allohippus stenonis1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 36 sites for Phocoena, 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
18 references- Alaska marine mammal stock assessments8
- Determining the ages of sub-fossil cetacean remains, found in the Carse of Stirling, Scotland4
- Archaeological and Historical Evidence for an 18th-Century "Blip" in the Distribution of the Northern Fur Seal at Kodiak Island, Alaska4
- Earliest Records of Holocene Cetaceans in the Black Sea3
- Catalog of Living Whales3
- First porpoise fossils (Cetacea: Phocoenidae) from the western North Atlantic, South Carolina2
- Hidden population turnover of small odontocetes in the northwestern North Pacific during the Holocene2
- A new marine vertebrate assemblage from the Late Neogene Purisima Formation in Central California, part II: Pinnipeds and Cetaceans1
- Sea ice expansion in the Bering Sea during the Neoglacial: evidence from archaeozoology1
- Whales, dorphines [dolphins] and porpoises off Shiretoko1
- Weer een schedel van Protophocaena minima erbij!1
- Sea mammal hunting and the Neoglacial: An archaeofaunal study of environmental change and subsistence technology at Margaret Bay, Unalaska1
Each of the 37 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. 6 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 content2
Picture of Phocoena
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- AVampireTear
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
3D model
- Source
- Sketchfab
- Licence
- CC0 Public Domain
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
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, “Phocoena”
- 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 itPhocoenidae through timeThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Cuvier 1816)