Laminariales
Kelps are large brown algae or seaweeds that make up the order Laminariales. There are about 30 genera. Despite its appearance and use of photosynthesis in chloroplasts, kelp is not a plant but a stramenopile.

Bjørn Christian Tørrissen · CC BY-SA 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
- PhaeophyceaePBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Phaeophyceae
- Environment
- marine,brackishPBDB, for Phaeophyceae
Time the record covers
At least 15 million years on record.
The record covers at least 27.3 Mya to 11.63 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 33.9 Mya to 7.246 Mya.
2 occurrences of Laminariales on record, most of them in the Oligocene. 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
2 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.
Found in
2 formations
Loading coastlines…
The named rock units Laminariales has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed.
Laminariales and its relatives
OligoceneWhere Laminariales and its relatives were recorded in the Oligocene.
Found in the same rock
17 taxa- Bathymodiolus willapaensis1 site
- Bolinichthys1 site
- Caulerpites1 site
- Chauliodus eximius1 site
- Julescraneia grandicornis1 site
- Lampanyctus1 site
- Limacina1 site
- Munida witteae1 site
- Myctophum1 site
- Paleocystophora acuminata1 site
- Paleocystophora plumosa1 site
- Paleohalidrys linguliformis1 site
- Pelagornis orri1 site
- Pleurophopsis thieli1 site
- Puffinus (Puffinus) diatomicus1 site
- Stomias affinis1 site
- Sula willetti1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 2 sites for Laminariales, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too.
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- Early Oligocene kelp holdfasts and stepwise evolution of the kelp ecosystem in the North Pacific1
- Non calcareous marine algae from California Miocene deposits1
Each of the 2 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 Laminariales
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Bjørn Christian Tørrissen
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Laminariales 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, “Kelp”
- 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 itPhaeophyceae through timeFormations of the OligoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0.