Aphalaridae
Aphalaridae is a family of insects in the superfamily Psylloidea, commonly known as jumping plant lice or psyllids with a worldwide distribution. It was first described in 1879 by Austrian Entomologist, Franz Löw along with the tribe Aphalarini. Like other psyllids, aphalarids are small, sap-sucking insects, and they are often highly host-specific.

Uncredited · 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
- PsylloideaPBDB
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Arthropoda
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Insecta
Time the record covers
At least 25 million years on record.
The record covers at least 41.03 Mya to 15.98 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 48.07 Mya to 11.63 Mya.
37 occurrences of Aphalaridae on record, most of them in the Eocene. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group, and the chart stops with its fossils rather than at the present. 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
37 occurrencesThese 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
5 formations
- Bembridge Marls Formation12
- Florissant Formation4
- Bouldnor Formation · Solent Group3
- Kishenehn Formation1
- Randeck Maar Formation1
Loading coastlines…
The named rock units Aphalaridae has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 16 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Aphalaridae and its relatives
EoceneWhere Aphalaridae and its relatives were recorded in the Eocene.
Found in the same rock
2,239 taxa- Gesomyrmex hoernesi5 sites
- Bradoponera meieri4 sites
- Lasius schiefferdeckeri4 sites
- Lype sericea4 sites
- Nylanderia pygmaea4 sites
- Plectrocnemia lata4 sites
- Prenolepis henschei4 sites
- Yantaromyrmex geinitzi4 sites
- Archipseudophasmatidae3 sites
- Attagenus hoffeinsorum3 sites
- Balticophasma3 sites
- Berosus barclayi3 sites
- Blattodea3 sites
- Ctenobethylus goepperti3 sites
- Dasyhelea3 sites
- Dicranomyia (Dicranomyia) lobata3 sites
- Eocamponotus mengei3 sites
- Formica flori3 sites
- Hypoponera atavia3 sites
- Lepidoptera3 sites
- Pachycondyla succinea3 sites
- Plagiolepis klinsmanni3 sites
- Plagiolepis kuenowi3 sites
- Plectrocnemia barbata3 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 18 sites for Aphalaridae, 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
18 references- New fossil hemipteran insects from southern England (Hemiptera: Psyllina + Coleorrhyncha)12
- New psyllids from the Baltic amber (Insecta: Homoptera, Aphalaridae)6
- New species of Eocene psyllids representing the tribe Paleopsylloidini Becker-Migdisova (Homoptera, Aphalaridae)2
- British fossil insects2
- The Tertiary Insects of North America2
- The first fossil member of Aphalaridae (Hemiptera, Sternorrhyncha, Psylloidea) from the Miocene of Southern Germany (Randeck Maar)1
- Phylogeny of the Eocene Aphalarinae (Hemiptera: Psylloidea) from Baltic amber, with description of a new species using X-ray micro-computed tomography scanning, and a new genus synonymy1
- The jumping plant-lice of the Neotropical genus Tainarys (Hemiptera: Psylloidea) associated with Anacardiaceae1
- The oldest jumping plant-louse (Hemiptera: Sternorrhyncha) with comments on the classification and nomenclature of the Palaeogene Psylloidea1
- Eogyropsylla sedzimiri sp. nov. from Eocene Baltic amber with a key to the species of the fossil genus Eogyropsylla Klimaszewski, 1993 (Hemiptera: Sternorrhyncha: Psylloidea)1
- Further data concerning Dominican amber jumping plant lice (Homoptera, Psylloidea)1
- Protoscena baltica gen. et sp. n from the Eocene Baltic amber (Hemiptera, Homoptera)1
Each of the 37 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. 6 further references are not listed. 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 Aphalaridae
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- nobody named on the record
- Licence
- not stated by the source
- Commercial use
- cannot be read from the licence given — check the record
No 3D scan of Aphalaridae 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
- Source
- Wikipedia, “Aphalaridae”
- 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 itPsylloidea through timeFormations of the EoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Loew 1879