Brachyphyllum
Searched as Brachyphyllum macrocarpum formosum. The Paleobiology Database treats Brachyphyllum as the accepted name.
Brachyphyllum is a form genus of fossil coniferous plant foliage. Plants of the genus have been variously assigned to several different conifer groups including Araucariaceae and Cheirolepidiaceae. They are known from around the globe from the Late Carboniferous to the Late Cretaceous periods.

the paleobear from Lontananza, Loreto, Peru · CC BY 2.0 · 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
- AraucariaceaePBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Streptophyta
Time the record covers
At most 35 million years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 100.5 Mya and 66 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
3 occurrences of Brachyphyllum 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
3 occurrences- Late Cretaceous100%
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
2 formations
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The named rock units Brachyphyllum has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed.
Brachyphyllum and its relatives
Late CretaceousWhere Brachyphyllum and its relatives were recorded in the Late Cretaceous.
Found in the same rock
875 taxa- Cladophlebis115 sites
- Otozamites94 sites
- Pagiophyllum91 sites
- Nilsonia83 sites
- Coniopteris80 sites
- Ptilophyllum77 sites
- Elatocladus71 sites
- Sphenopteris69 sites
- Equisetites63 sites
- Zamites63 sites
- Pterophyllum55 sites
- Phlebopteris54 sites
- Podozamites54 sites
- Elatides52 sites
- Sagenopteris52 sites
- Ginkgo45 sites
- Taeniopteris45 sites
- Czekanowskia44 sites
- Araucarites43 sites
- Pachypteris43 sites
- Pityophyllum40 sites
- Pseudoctenis40 sites
- Sphenobaiera39 sites
- Ctenis38 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 307 sites for Brachyphyllum, and this reads 240 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
2 references- Upper Cretaceous floras of the eastern Gulf region in Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia2
- The Upper Cretaceous and Eocene floras of South Carolina and Georgia1
Each of the 3 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. Each entry links to doi.org. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content2
Picture of Brachyphyllum
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- the paleobear from Lontananza, Loreto, Peru
- Licence
- CC BY 2.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
3D model
- Source
- Sketchfab
- Licence
- CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
- Commercial use
- the licence does not allow it
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 itAraucariaceae through timeFormations of the Late CretaceousThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Brongniart 1828