Sporolithon
Sporolithon is a genus of red coralline algae in the family Sporolithaceae, in the order Corallinales.

Internet Archive Book Images · No restrictions · 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
- SporolithaceaePBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Rhodophyta
Time the record covers
At least 132 million years on record.
The record covers at least 132.6 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 137.05 Mya to 0 Mya.
581 occurrences of Sporolithon 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
581 occurrences- Early Cretaceous3%
- Late Cretaceous2%
- Paleocene20%
- Eocene44%
- Oligocene12%
- Miocene14%
- Plioceneunder 1%
- Pleistocene3%
- Holocene1%
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
113 formations
- Sylhet Formation Formation32
- Dobranberg Formation Formation28
- Lakadong Formation · Shlhet Limestone Group27
- Marne di Priabona Formation17
- Prang Formation · Sylhet Limestone Group12
- Navarri Formation11
Loading coastlines…
The named rock units Sporolithon has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 89 further formations hold fewer occurrences each and are not listed. 168 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Sporolithon and its relatives
EoceneWhere Sporolithon and its relatives were recorded in the Eocene.
Found in the same rock
556 taxa- Lithothamnion99 sites
- Mesophyllum62 sites
- Polystrata alba58 sites
- Lithoporella52 sites
- Nummulites31 sites
- Spongites30 sites
- Halimeda28 sites
- Lithophyllum26 sites
- Distichoplax biserialis25 sites
- Lithoporella melobesioides24 sites
- Discocyclina22 sites
- Elianella elegans21 sites
- Neomeris21 sites
- Neogoniolithon19 sites
- Acicularia18 sites
- Operculina18 sites
- Corallina17 sites
- Melobesioideae17 sites
- Miscellanea16 sites
- Cymopolia15 sites
- Planorbulina cretae14 sites
- Bryozoa12 sites
- Haddonia praeheissigi12 sites
- Solenomeris12 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 451 sites for Sporolithon, and this reads 240 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
169 references- Palaeocene reef complex of the Western Carpathians42
- The Enigmatic Paleocene-Eocene coralline Distichoplax: Approaching the structural complexities, ecological affinities and extinction hypotheses32
- Upper Eocene larger foraminiferal–coralline algal facies from the Klokova Mountain (southern continental Greece)30
- Facies and palaeoecology of rhodoliths and acervulinid macroids in the Eocene of the Krappfeld (Austria)28
- Late Chattian platform carbonates with benthic foraminifera and coralline algae from the SE Iberian plate26
- Calcareous algae from the Lakadong Formation of the South Shillong Plateau, NE India19
- Coralline Algae at the Paleocene/Eocene Thermal Maximum in the Southern Pyrenees (N Spain)18
- Larger foraminiferal and coralline algal facies in an Upper Eocene storm-influenced, shallow-water carbonate platform (Colli Berici, north-eastern Italy)15
- Middle Eocene Rhodoliths from Tropical and Mid-Latitude Regions12
- Coralline red algal limestones of the late Eocene alpine Foreland Basin in Upper Austria: Component analysis, facies and palecology11
- Contribution to the knowledge of the Palaeogene reef-complexes of the Myjava-Hricov-Haligovka Zone (West Carpathians)10
- Upper Eocene paleobathymetry approach based on paleoecological assemblages (preliminary report from the Plesca Valley 2. outcrop, Transylvania)9
Each of the 581 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. 157 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 Sporolithon
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Internet Archive Book Images
- Licence
- No restrictions
- Commercial use
- cannot be read from the licence given — check the record
No 3D scan of Sporolithon 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, “Sporolithon”
- 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 itSporolithaceae through timeFormations of the EoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Rothpletz 1891