Sunella

Sunella is an extinct genus of bivalved arthropod known from the Cambrian of China. Named after paleontologist and geologist Sun Yunzhu, it was described by Huo Shicheng in 1965. It is the type genus of the family Sunellidae. The type species is S. grandis.

Sunella

Cong Liu, Stephen Pates, Mingjing Zhang, Yu Wu, Jiaxin Ma, Dongjing Fu & Xingliang Zhang · CC BY 4.0 · 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
SunellidaePBDB
Motility
actively mobilePBDB, for Arthropoda

Time the record covers

At least 474 million years on record.

The record covers at least 516 Mya to 41.03 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 521 Mya to 37.71 Mya.

Cambrian — about 4 of 5 occurrencesCambrianOrdovician — about 0 of 5 occurrencesSilurian — about 0 of 5 occurrencesDevonian — about 0 of 5 occurrencesCarboniferous — about 0 of 5 occurrencesPermian — about 0 of 5 occurrencesEarly Triassic — about 0 of 5 occurrencesMiddle Triassic — about 0 of 5 occurrencesLate Triassic — about 0 of 5 occurrencesEarly Jurassic — about 0 of 5 occurrencesMiddle Jurassic — about 0 of 5 occurrencesLate Jurassic — about 0 of 5 occurrencesEarly Cretaceous — about 0 of 5 occurrencesLate Cretaceous — about 0 of 5 occurrencesPaleocene — about 0 of 5 occurrencesEocene — about 1 of 5 occurrencesOligocene — about 0 of 5 occurrences531–514 Mya — about 3 occurrences514–497 Mya — about 0.9 occurrences45–28 Mya — about 1 occurrence516 Mya41.03 Mya531 Mya28 Mya

5 occurrences of Sunella on record, most of them in the Cambrian. 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

4 formations

Bystrinskaya — 43.11°N, 74.78°EBarton Clay — 50.74°N, 1.69°WJiumenchong — 28.17°N, 109.17°EShuijingtuo — 30.50°N, 111.16°E

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

Sunella and its relatives

Cambrian

Where Sunella and its relatives were recorded in the Cambrian.

Found in the same rock

162 taxa

The Paleobiology Database records 4 sites for Sunella, 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

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. 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 Sunella

Credit
Cong Liu, Stephen Pates, Mingjing Zhang, Yu Wu, Jiaxin Ma, Dongjing Fu & Xingliang Zhang
Licence
CC BY 4.0
Commercial use
the licence allows it

No 3D scan of Sunella was found in Smithsonian Open Access and Sketchfab.

MorphoSource was 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 itSunellidae through timeFormations of the CambrianThe world it lived on

Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Huo 1965