The Echinoid Directory

• Test ovate in outline, depressed in profile with rounded ambitus; slight notch at posterior in plan view.
• Apical system central, tetrabasal with four gonopores; genital plates unequal in size, with G3 smallest; all genital plates in contact. The posterior ocular plates abutting to the rear of the posterior genital plates.
• Periproct large, ovate, marginal in postition.
• Ambulacra narrow adapically, pore-pairs small, simple, uniserial throughout, becoming offset in arcs of three adorally forming broad bands. No buccal pores.
• Interambulacra wide. Tuberculation of small uniform primaries with slightly sunken areoles scattered over plates; in between there is dense uniform granulation. No oral/aboral differentiation.
• No peg-like granules sutured to the test aborally.
• Peristome subcentral, oblique, distinctly oblique with the long axis running from Amb I to Iamb 3.
• Lantern, lantern supports and spines all unknown.

Lower Cretaceous (Aptian-Lower Albian), France, UK.

• Only the type species was originally included.

Irregularia; Echinoneoida, Conulidae.

Monotypic. 

Distinguished from Conulus by its flatter profile with the absence of peg-like granules sutured to the aboral interambulacral plates. Furthermore, its periproct is large and marginal rather than small and inframarginal. Conulopyrina has strongly developed phyllodes unlike Globator species, but is otherwise very similar.

Hawkins, H. L. 1921. Morphological studies on the Echinoidea Holectypoida and their allies. XI. Conulopyrina anomala, a new type of the Echinoneida. Geological Magazine, 58, 420-426.

Smith, A. B. & Wright, C. W. 1999. British Cretaceous Echinoids. Part 5, Holectypoida, Echinoneoida. Monograph of the Palaeontographical Society London: pp. 343-390, pls 115-129 (publication number 612, part of volume 153).