Alienopteridae

Alienopteridae is an extinct family of dictyopterans, known from the Early Cretaceous to the Eocene epoch. They are noted for their unusual combination of features not found in other dictyopterans.

Alienopteridae

Ta-tea-two-te-to · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikipedia/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
AlienopteraPBDB
Motility
actively mobilePBDB, for Arthropoda
Environment
terrestrialPBDB, for Insecta

Time the record covers

At least 62 million years on record.

The record covers at least 113.2 Mya to 51.1 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 119.57 Mya to 45.9 Mya.

Early Cretaceous — about 5 of 29 occurrencesEarly CretaceousLate Cretaceous — about 22 of 29 occurrencesLate CretaceousPaleocene — about 0 of 29 occurrencesEocene — about 2 of 29 occurrencesEocene121–118 Mya — about 0.3 occurrences118–116 Mya — about 0.8 occurrences116–113 Mya — about 0.8 occurrences113–111 Mya — about 0.6 occurrences111–108 Mya — about 0.6 occurrences108–106 Mya — about 0.6 occurrences106–103 Mya — about 0.6 occurrences103–101 Mya — about 0.6 occurrences101–98 Mya — about 8 occurrences98–96 Mya — about 9 occurrences96–93 Mya — about 5 occurrences52–50 Mya — about 0.6 occurrences50–47 Mya — about 1.0 occurrences47–44 Mya — about 0.4 occurrences113.2 Mya51.1 Mya121 Mya44 Mya

29 occurrences of Alienopteridae on record, most of them in the Late Cretaceous. 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

29 occurrences

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

3 formations

Jinju — 35.13°N, 128.10°ECrato — 7.13°S, 39.70°WGreen River — 39.53°N, 107.95°W

Loading coastlines…

The named rock units Alienopteridae has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 22 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.

Alienopteridae and its relatives

Late Cretaceous

Where Alienopteridae and its relatives were recorded in the Late Cretaceous.

Found in the same rock

1,201 taxa

The Paleobiology Database records 17 sites for Alienopteridae, and this reads all 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

11 references

Each of the 29 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. Entries link to doi.org where the Paleobiology Database holds an identifier, and to its own record where it does not. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.

Media and terms

Media content1

Picture of Alienopteridae

Credit
Ta-tea-two-te-to
Licence
CC BY-SA 4.0
Commercial use
the licence allows it

No 3D scan of Alienopteridae 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.

The description on this site

Licence
CC BY-SA 4.0

This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.

Keep going

What may have been alongside itAlienoptera through timeFormations of the Late CretaceousThe world it lived on

Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Bai et al. 2016