Tellina
Searched as Tellina decorata ovalina. The Paleobiology Database treats Tellina as the accepted name.
Tellina is a widely distributed genus of marine bivalve molluscs, in the family Tellinidae. It is also known as "tellin" in English.

Rebecca Johnson · 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
- TellinidaePBDB
- Diet
- deposit feederPBDB
- Life habit
- deep infaunalPBDB
- Motility
- facultatively mobilePBDB
- Vision
- blindPBDB, for Bivalvia
Time the record covers
At most 3.9 million years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 37.71 Mya and 33.9 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
3 occurrences of Tellina on record, most of them in the Eocene. 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
3 occurrences- Eocene100%
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.
Tellina and its relatives
EoceneWhere Tellina and its relatives were recorded in the Eocene.
Found in the same rock
2,622 taxa- Corbula62 sites
- Turritella59 sites
- Nuculana56 sites
- Cymbophora55 sites
- Glycymeris48 sites
- Ostrea47 sites
- Anomia argentaria44 sites
- Cadulus44 sites
- Granocardium44 sites
- Syncyclonema39 sites
- Serpula36 sites
- Cubitostrea tecticosta35 sites
- Cyprimeria35 sites
- Lucina34 sites
- Nucula34 sites
- Striarca34 sites
- Dentalium33 sites
- Euspira rectilabrum33 sites
- Linearis30 sites
- Crassatella vadosa29 sites
- Cyclorisma29 sites
- Turritella trilira29 sites
- Caestocorbula28 sites
- Camptonectes bubonis28 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 1,175 sites for Tellina, and this reads 240 of them. Of that, one read hit the database's own return limit, so every count below is a floor rather than a total. 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 referenceEach of the 3 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 the Paleobiology Database's own record for the work.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Tellina
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Rebecca Johnson
- Licence
- CC BY 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Tellina 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, “Tellina”
- 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 itTellinidae through timeFormations of the EoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Linnaeus 1758)