Gephyrosaurus
Gephyrosaurus is an extinct genus of lepidosaurian reptile known from the Late Triassic to Early Jurassic of the United Kingdom. It is generally considered to be one of the most primitive members of the clade Rhynchocephalia.

Hemiauchenia · CC0 · 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
- RhynchocephaliaPBDB
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Osteichthyes
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Amniota
Time the record covers
At most 13 million years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 205.7 Mya and 192.9 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
8 occurrences of Gephyrosaurus on record, most of them in the Early 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
8 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.
Gephyrosaurus and its relatives
Early JurassicWhere Gephyrosaurus and its relatives were recorded in the Early Jurassic.
Found in the same rock
58 taxa- Morganucodon watsoni5 sites
- Hirmeriella muensteri4 sites
- Archosauria2 sites
- Kuehneotherium2 sites
- Kuehneotherium praecursoris2 sites
- Lycospora2 sites
- Rhamphorhynchidae2 sites
- Thomasia moorei2 sites
- Triletes2 sites
- Agkistracanthus mitgelensis1 site
- Amphibia1 site
- Bennettitales1 site
- Birgeria1 site
- Birgeria acuminata1 site
- Bridetherium dorisae1 site
- Ceratodus1 site
- Clevosaurus convallis1 site
- Colobodus1 site
- Coniferophyta1 site
- Crocodylomorpha1 site
- Crocodylomorpha indet.1 site
- Ctenis1 site
- Cycadolepis1 site
- Dipnoi1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 7 sites for Gephyrosaurus, 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
4 references- Assemblages of small tetrapods from the Early Jurassic of Britain5
- Late Triassic terrestrial microvertebrates from Charles Moore’s ‘Microlestes’ quarry, Holwell, Somerset, UK1
- The Late Triassic and Early Jurassic fissure faunas from Bristol and South Wales: stratigraphy and setting1
- The skull of a new eosuchian reptile from the Lower Jurassic of South Wales1
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 Gephyrosaurus
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Hemiauchenia
- Licence
- CC0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Gephyrosaurus 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
- 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 itRhynchocephalia through timeFormations of the Early JurassicThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Evans 1980