The Echinoid Directory

• Test of small to medium size, elongate, greatest width posterior to centre, flattened above and below, slightly depressed towards peristome, with a pointed posterior margin.
• Apical system anterior, compact, monobasal, with three large genital pores, genital plate 3 lacking gonopore.
• Petals broad, with wide poriferous zones, narrow interporiferous zones, pores strongly conjugate, outer pore obliquely elongated, inner pore circular. Petals weakly tapering and remaining open distally.
• Peristome anterior, longer than wide, pentagonal. Opening sunken, with vertical-walled entrance.
• Periproct marginal to slightly inframarginal, ovate, slightly taller than wide.
• Bourrelets well developed as low mounds surrounding peristome.
• Phyllodes single pored, with two series in each half-ambulacrum.
• Buccal pores present.
• Tubercles slightly larger adorally than adapically, no naked or pitted zone in interambulacrum 5.

• Miocene of Malta.

Pygorhynchus vassalli Wright, 1855, p. 271; by subsequent designation of Cooke, 1942, p. 38.

• B. vassalli (Wright, 1855); Miocene, Malta.

Irregularia; Cassiduloida; Neolampadidae.

Subjective junior synonym of Pliolampas Pomel, 1883.

Mortensen (1948, p. 247) provisionally refers Breynella to Pliolampas, but suggests that the two may be distinct, as he mistakenly thought Breynella had four genital pores.

The type species of Breynella is very similar to the type species of Pliolampas. Both are of similar shape and size, with equal, open and broad petals, that have broad interporiferous zones, a longitudinal peristome and a well developed floscelle, with phyllodes that have five or six single pores in each outer series and one or two in each inner series (Kier, 1962, p. 196). They differ slightly in the position of the periproct, being more marginal in Breynella and more inframarginal in the type species of Pliolampas. Kier (1962, p. 195) synonymized Breynella as a subjective junior synonym of Pliolampas Pomel, 1888. In periproct position, however, Breynella is identical to Oolopygus and the two type species differ only in the relative development of their petals (stronger in Breynella) and the presence of a naked tubercle-free zone to the posterior of Oolopygus.

Gregory, J. W. 1891. The Maltese fossil Echinoidea, and their evidence on the correlation of Maltese rocks. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 36, 589-639.

P. M. Kier. 1962. Revision of the cassiduloid echinoids. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 144, (3), 262 pp.

T. Mortensen. 1948. A monograph of the Echinoidea: 4 (1): Holectypoida, Cassiduloida. C. A. Reitzel, Copenhagen, 363 pp., 14 pls.