Parachiton Thiele, 1909

Dell’Angelo, Bruno, Landau, Bernard M., Sosso, Maurizio & Taviani, Marco, 2020, Late Pleistocene Red Sea Mollusca: 1. Polyplacophora, Zootaxa 4772 (3), pp. 401-449 : 406

Genus Parachiton Thiele, 1909

Type species. Lepidopleurus (Parachiton) acuminatus Thiele, 1909 , by original designation.

Remarks. Parachiton was erected by Thiele (1909) as a subgenus of Lepidopleurus on the basis of its disproportionately large tail valve with subterminal mucro, and an overall similarity of the other valves with species of Lepidopleurus . It is now considered a separate genus ( Sirenko 2006), based also on radular differences ( Saito 1996). There are 23 Recent species known to date, all distributed in the Indo-West Pacific except for P. africanus ( Nierstrasz, 1906) from the Mediterranean Sea.

Distribution. Parachiton is known from the Miocene to the present-day. The fossil record includes Miocene to Pleistocene deposits of the Mediterranean area ( Dell’Angelo et al. 2015, 2018a) and the Miocene (Badenian) of the Paratethys ( Šulc 1934; Bałuk 1971, 1984; Ruman & Hudácková 2015).