Diplacanthus
Searched as Diplacanthus gravis. The Paleobiology Database treats Diplacanthus as the accepted name.

FunkMonk · 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
- DiplacanthidaePBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB, for Acanthodii
- Life habit
- nektonicPBDB, for Acanthodii
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Acanthodii
Time the record covers
At most 5.7 million years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 387.95 Mya and 382.31 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
8 occurrences of Diplacanthus on record, most of them in the Devonian. 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
8 occurrences- Devonian100%
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
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The named rock units Diplacanthus has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 2 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Diplacanthus and its relatives
DevonianWhere Diplacanthus and its relatives were recorded in the Devonian.
Found in the same rock
231 taxa- Glyptolepis8 sites
- Cheiracanthus7 sites
- Cheiracanthus brevicostatus6 sites
- Cheirolepis trailli6 sites
- Coccosteus cuspidatus6 sites
- Actinopterygii5 sites
- Cheiracanthus latus5 sites
- Cheiracanthus murchisoni5 sites
- Cheirolepis5 sites
- Osteolepis macrolepidotus5 sites
- Pterichthyodes milleri5 sites
- Acanthodes4 sites
- Asterolepis4 sites
- Dipterus valenciennesi4 sites
- Glyptolepis leptopterus4 sites
- Gyroptychius4 sites
- Ptychodictyon rimosum4 sites
- Rhadinacanthus longispinus4 sites
- Sarcopterygii4 sites
- Schizosteus4 sites
- Acanthodii3 sites
- Byssacanthus dilatatus3 sites
- Chondrichthyes3 sites
- Devononchus concinnus3 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 21 sites for Diplacanthus, 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
3 references- The Middle Devonian fishes of the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia) and Belarus5
- A new species of the Devonian actinopterygian fish Moythomasia from Belarus2
- End-Devonian extinction and a bottleneck in the early evolution of modern jawed vertebrates1
Each of the 8 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 Diplacanthus
- Source
- Wikidata/Commons
- Credit
- FunkMonk
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Diplacanthus 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.
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itDiplacanthidae through timeFormations of the DevonianThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Agassiz 1843