Dryolestoidea
Dryolestida is an extinct order of mammals, known from the Jurassic and Cretaceous. They are considered basal members of the clade Cladotheria, close to the ancestry of therian mammals. It is also believed that they developed a fully mammalian jaw and also had the three middle ear bones. Most members of the group, as with most Mesozoic mammals, are only known from fragmentary tooth and jaw remains.

P.Fernandes ( Trebaruna ) · CC BY 3.0 · 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
- CladotheriaPBDB
- Diet
- insectivorePBDB, for Mammaliaformes
- Life habit
- scansorialPBDB, for Mammaliaformes
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Osteichthyes
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Mammalia
Time the record covers
At least 147 million years on record.
The record covers at least 165.3 Mya to 17.5 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 168.2 Mya to 16.3 Mya.
163 occurrences of Dryolestoidea on record, most of them in the Late Jurassic. 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
163 occurrences- Middle Jurassic2%
- Late Jurassic50%
- Early Cretaceous22%
- Late Cretaceous23%
- Paleoceneunder 1%
- Miocene2%
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
28 formations
- Morrison Formation64
- Los Alamitos Formation17
- Lulworth Formation · Purbeck Group16
- Ksar Metlili Formation10
- Alcobaça Formation8
- La Colonia Formation7
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The named rock units Dryolestoidea has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 4 further formations hold fewer occurrences each and are not listed. 4 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Dryolestoidea and its relatives
Late JurassicWhere Dryolestoidea and its relatives were recorded in the Late Jurassic.
Found in the same rock
825 taxa- Mammalia21 sites
- Dryolestidae19 sites
- Theropoda18 sites
- Pterosauria16 sites
- Goniopholis15 sites
- Anura14 sites
- Squamata12 sites
- Actinopterygii11 sites
- Caudata10 sites
- Dromaeosauridae10 sites
- Ornithopoda10 sites
- Testudines10 sites
- Atoposauridae9 sites
- Symmetrodonta9 sites
- Camarasaurus8 sites
- Glyptops8 sites
- Ornithischia8 sites
- Paramacellodus8 sites
- Albanerpetontidae7 sites
- Choristodera7 sites
- Cteniogenys antiquus7 sites
- Dorsetisaurus7 sites
- Multituberculata7 sites
- Theriosuchus7 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 64 sites for Dryolestoidea, 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
70 references- New Jurassic mammals from Como Bluff, Wyoming, and the interrelationships of non-tribosphenic Theria14
- Monograph of the fossil Mammalia of the Mesozoic formations9
- New data on the microvertebrate fauna from the Upper Jurassic or lowest Cretaceous of Ksar Metlili (Anoual Syncline, eastern Morocco)8
- Paleoecological analysis of the vertebrate fauna of the Morrison Formation (Upper Jurassic), Rocky Mountain region, U.S.A.8
- Mammalian faunas of the Morrison Formation8
- New Late Cretaceous mammals from the Los Alamitos Formation, Northern Patagonia7
- American Mesozoic Mammalia7
- Mesozoic Mammalia. VI. Genera of Morrison pantotheres7
- Dryolestidae (Dryolestida, Mammalia) aus dem Oberen Jura von Portugal6
- New fossil mammal remains from the Chorrillo Formation (Maastrichtian, Upper Cretaceous), Santa Cruz Province, Argentina3
- New mammals from the Upper Cretaceous Allen Formation (Patagonia, Argentina) and reassessment of meridiolestidan diversity3
- A revision of the putative Late Cretaceous triconodonts from South America3
Each of the 163 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. 58 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 Dryolestoidea
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- P.Fernandes ( Trebaruna )
- Licence
- CC BY 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Dryolestoidea 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, “Dryolestida”
- 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 itCladotheria through timeFormations of the Late JurassicThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Butler 1939)