Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- In Lamarck's system of classification, headless mollusks with bivalve shells: a loose synonym of Lamellibranchiata, but including the brachiopods, which are now placed in a different class.
- Disencumbered of the brachiopods, the Conchifera correspond to the Acephala testacea of Cuvier, or to the Lamellibranchiata of De Blainville and modern naturalists. Also called Conchophora, Acephala, Endocephala, Lipoccphala, and Pelecypoda.
- In Gegenbaur's system of classification, one of two primary divisions of the Mollusca; the Mollusca of authors in general, exclusive of the Placophora or chitons.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun plural (Zoöl.) That class of Mollusca which includes the bivalve shells; the Lamellibranchiata. See
mollusca .
Etymologies
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Examples
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Arrows indicate the crown groups of 1, molluscs; 2, conchifera; 3, cephalopods.
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Its place, above the red sandstone, shews the recurrence of circumstances favourable to animal life, and we accordingly find in it not only zoophytes, conchifera, and a few tribes of fish, but some faint traces of land plants, and a new and startling appearance -- a reptile of saurian (lizard) character, analogous to the now existing family called monitors.
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation Robert Chambers 1836
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Zoophyta, polyparia, crinoidea, conchifera, and crustacea, {60} are the orders of the animal kingdom thus found in the earliest of earth's sepulchres.
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation Robert Chambers 1836
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In this era, the forms of life which existed in the Silurian are continued: we have the same orders of marine creatures, zoophyta, polypiaria, conchifera, crustacea; but to these are added numerous fishes, some of which are of most extraordinary and surprising forms.
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation Robert Chambers 1836
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The Proteaceous tree was small, from twelve to fifteen feet high, of stunted and irregular habit, with dark, fissured bark, and large medullary rays in its red wood: its leaves were of a silvery colour, about two inches and a half long, and three-quarters broad; its seed-vessels woody and orbicular, like the single seed-vessels of the Banksia conchifera; the seeds were surrounded by a broad transparent membrane.
Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia : from Moreton Bay to Port Essington, a distance of upwards of 3000 miles, during the years 1844-1845 Ludwig Leichhardt 1830
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The muscular attachments, of which there are many, to the two valves of the conchifera, may be viewed as the attachments of the muscles of the animal frame to the bones, by which we are enabled to enjoy locomotion.
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The sandstone bed that has been worn down to form it contains no fossils, save here and there a carbonaceous stem; but in an underlying harder stratum we occasionally find a few shells; and, with a specimen in my hand charged with a group of bivalves resembling the existing conchifera of our sandy beaches, I was turning aside this sand of the Oölite, so curiously reduced to its original state, and marking how nearly the recent shells that lay embedded in it resembled the extinct ones that had lain in it so long before, when I became aware of a peculiar sound that it yielded to the tread, as my companions paced over it.
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