Blochiidae
Blochiidae is an extinct family of small-sized billfish known from the Late Paleocene to the Middle Eocene from the northern Tethys Ocean and the Pacific coast of South America.

User:Haplochromis · CC BY-SA 3.0 · via Wikidata/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
- IstiophoriformesPBDB
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Osteichthyes
Time the record covers
At least 24 million years on record.
The record covers at least 72.2 Mya to 48.07 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 83.6 Mya to 37.71 Mya.
7 occurrences of Blochiidae 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
7 occurrences- Late Cretaceous14%
- Eocene86%
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
- Millongue Formation1
- Navesink Formation · Monmouth Group1
- London Clay Formation · Thames Group1
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The named rock units Blochiidae has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 4 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Blochiidae and its relatives
EoceneWhere Blochiidae and its relatives were recorded in the Eocene.
Found in the same rock
440 taxa- Aprionodon amekiensis2 sites
- Burnhamia2 sites
- Enchodontidae2 sites
- Isurus2 sites
- Myliobatis2 sites
- Odontaspis2 sites
- Osteichthyes2 sites
- Physogaleus tertius2 sites
- Plantae2 sites
- Rhinoptera sherborni2 sites
- Striatolamia macrota2 sites
- Testudines2 sites
- ? Congorhynchus elliotti1 site
- "Gentonia" sp.1 site
- "Maffeia" sp.1 site
- Abdobalistum thyrsus1 site
- Abdounia beaugei1 site
- Abdounia recticona1 site
- Abromasta microdon1 site
- Acanthocybiinae1 site
- Acanthocybium1 site
- Acanthonemus subaureus1 site
- Acanthopygaeus agassizi1 site
- Acanthuroides massalongoi1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 6 sites for Blochiidae, 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
5 references- The Pesciara-Monte Postale Fossil-Lagerstätte: 2. Fishes and other vertebrates2
- Novyye mestonakhozhdeniya ostatkov pozvonochnykh v fosforitakh srednego eotsena Tsentral'nykh Kyzylkumov i usloviya formirovaniya zernistykh fosforitov. New locality of vertebrate remains in middle Eocene phosphate rocks of central Kyzylkum and formation2
- Loancorhynchus catrillancai gen. et sp. nov., a new swordfish (Xiphioidei, Blochiidae) from the Middle Eocene of central Chile1
- The English Chalk and London Clay: two remarkable British bony fish Lagerstatten1
- Vertebrate Paleontology and Stratigraphy of the Late Cretaceous Holmdel Park Site, Monmouth County, New Jersey1
Each of the 7 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 Blochiidae
- Source
- Wikidata/Commons
- Credit
- User:Haplochromis
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Blochiidae was found in MorphoSource and Sketchfab.
Smithsonian Open Access was 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, “Blochiidae”
- 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 itIstiophoriformes through timeFormations of the EoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Bleeker 1859