Thoracosphaera
Searched as Thoracosphaera crassa. The Paleobiology Database treats Thoracosphaera as the accepted name.

Hannes Grobe/AWI · CC BY 3.0 · via Wikidata/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
- ThoracosphaeralesPBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Dinoflagellata
- Environment
- freshwaterPBDB, for Dinophyceae
Time the record covers
At most 4.4 million years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 66 Mya and 61.66 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
2 occurrences of Thoracosphaera on record, most of them in the Paleocene. 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
2 occurrences- Paleocene100%
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
1 formation
Loading coastlines…
The named rock units Thoracosphaera has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed.
Thoracosphaera and its relatives
PaleoceneWhere Thoracosphaera and its relatives were recorded in the Paleocene.
Found in the same rock
384 taxa- Helicosphaera carteri185 sites
- Coccolithus pelagicus174 sites
- Reticulofenestra160 sites
- Calcidiscus leptoporus159 sites
- Umbilicosphaera155 sites
- Pontosphaera132 sites
- Gephyrocapsa124 sites
- Dictyococcites103 sites
- Discoaster102 sites
- Pseudoemiliania97 sites
- Sphenolithus moriformis96 sites
- Reticulofenestra minuta92 sites
- Umbilicosphaera jafari84 sites
- Reticulofenestra pseudoumbilicus81 sites
- Cyclicargolithus floridanus80 sites
- Discoaster brouweri78 sites
- Syracosphaera74 sites
- Calcidiscus69 sites
- Sphenolithus abies65 sites
- Florisphaera58 sites
- Sphenolithus55 sites
- Calcidiscus macintyrei54 sites
- Rhabdosphaera46 sites
- Coccolithus44 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 459 sites for Thoracosphaera, 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
1 referenceEach of the 2 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 doi.org. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1

Picture of Thoracosphaera
- Source
- Wikidata/Commons
- Credit
- Hannes Grobe/AWI
- Licence
- CC BY 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Thoracosphaera 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.
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itThoracosphaerales through timeFormations of the PaleoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Kamptner 1927