Machaeridia
Machaeridia is an extinct group of armoured, segmented annelid worms, known from the Early Ordovician to Carboniferous. It consists of three distinct families: the plumulitids, turrilepadids and lepidocoleids.

British Museum (Natural History).; Withers, Thomas Henry · Public Domain · 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
- AphroditiformiaPBDB
- Diet
- grazerPBDB
- Life habit
- epifaunalPBDB
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB
- Vision
- limitedPBDB, for Polychaeta
Time the record covers
At least 146 million years on record.
The record covers at least 477.1 Mya to 330.3 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 486.85 Mya to 323.4 Mya.
122 occurrences of Machaeridia on record, most of them in the Ordovician. 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
122 occurrences- Ordovician57%
- Silurian20%
- Devonian8%
- Carboniferous14%
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
62 formations
- Bangor Limestone Formation6
- Kope Formation5
- Borden Formation5
- Králuv Dvur Formation4
- Tumugol Formation4
- Jerrestad Shale Formation3
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The named rock units Machaeridia has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 38 further formations hold fewer occurrences each and are not listed. 14 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Machaeridia and its relatives
OrdovicianWhere Machaeridia and its relatives were recorded in the Ordovician.
Found in the same rock
1,777 taxa- Lepidocoleus32 sites
- Plumulites31 sites
- Cornulites21 sites
- Ostracoda21 sites
- Ctenodonta19 sites
- Gastropoda18 sites
- Spirorbis18 sites
- Climacograptus17 sites
- Echinoidea15 sites
- Modiolopsis15 sites
- Bryozoa14 sites
- Lingula14 sites
- Crinoidea13 sites
- Petrocrania13 sites
- Fenestella12 sites
- Hyolithes12 sites
- Isotelus12 sites
- Nuculites12 sites
- Rafinesquina12 sites
- Sinuites12 sites
- Conularia11 sites
- Corynotrypa11 sites
- Craniops11 sites
- Dichocrinus11 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 104 sites for Machaeridia, 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
62 references- The fossil fauna of the Ordovician in the Cincinnati Region8
- The Paleontology and Paleoecology of the Lower Bangor Limestone (Chesterian, Mississippian)in northwestern Alabama6
- The biostratigraphy of the Ordovician of Bohemia6
- Paleontology and Paleoecology of the Basal New Providence Shale (Osagian: Mississippian) at Paris Landing, Tennessee5
- Earliest occurrence of the Hirnantia Fauna in the Prague Basin (Czech Republic)4
- Ecological Change during the early Emsian (Devonian) in the Tafilalt (Morocco),the Origin of the Ammonoidea,and the First African Pyrgocystid Edrioasteroids,Machaerids and Phyllocarids4
- Morphometric analysis of Tremadocian (earliest Ordovician) kirkocystid mitrates (Echinodermata, Stylophora) from the Taebaeksan Basin, Korea4
- The Ordovician-Silurian boundary in the Garth area of southwest Powys, Wales4
- A boring through Middle and Upper Ordovician strata at Koängen in western Scania, southern Sweden4
- Machaeridians from the Lower Silurian (Llandowery, Telychian) of Shorpshire, England3
- Gradient ecology of a biotic invasion: biofacies of the type Cincinnatian Series (Upper Ordovician), Cincinnati, Ohio region, USA3
- Caradocian-Gedinnian echinoderm associations of Central and Eastern North America3
Each of the 122 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. 50 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 Machaeridia
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- British Museum (Natural History).; Withers, Thomas Henry
- Licence
- Public Domain
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan was found. Smithsonian Open Access, MorphoSource and Sketchfab were all searched.
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 itAphroditiformia through timeFormations of the OrdovicianThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0.