Orthophlebiidae
Orthophlebiidae is an extinct family of scorpionflies known from the Triassic to Cretaceous, belonging to the superfamily Panorpoidea. The family is poorly defined and is probably paraphyletic, representing many primitive members of Panorpoidea with most species only known from isolated wings, and has such been considered a wastebasket taxon.

Yan-jie Zhang, Peter J. M. Shih, Jun-you Wang, Maria E. McNamara, Chungkun Shih, Dong Ren & Tai-ping Gao · CC BY 4.0 · 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
- PanorpoideaPBDB
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Arthropoda
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Insecta
Time the record covers
At least 140 million years on record.
The record covers at least 241.464 Mya to 100.5 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 247 Mya to 93.9 Mya.
216 occurrences of Orthophlebiidae 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
216 occurrences- Middle Triassic4%
- Late Triassic11%
- Early Jurassic40%
- Middle Jurassic14%
- Late Jurassic22%
- Early Cretaceous8%
- Late Cretaceousunder 1%
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
45 formations
- Daohugou Formation26
- Dzhil Formation16
- Posidonia Shale Formation12
- Karabastau Formation10
- Sulyukta Formation7
- Lilstock Formation · Penarth Group7
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The named rock units Orthophlebiidae has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 21 further formations hold fewer occurrences each and are not listed. 51 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Orthophlebiidae and its relatives
Early JurassicWhere Orthophlebiidae and its relatives were recorded in the Early Jurassic.
Found in the same rock
3,909 taxa- Orthophlebia liassica14 sites
- Odonata9 sites
- Coleoptera7 sites
- Orthophlebia elenae7 sites
- Orthophlebia extensa7 sites
- Panorpidium geinitzi7 sites
- Procramptonomyia kovalevi7 sites
- Coleopteron6 sites
- Eoptychoptera simplex6 sites
- Heterophlebia buckmani6 sites
- Heterothemis brodiei6 sites
- Holcoptera schlotheimi6 sites
- Juraphlebia eugeniae6 sites
- Limoniidae6 sites
- Necrotaulius parvulus6 sites
- Orthoptera6 sites
- Panorpidium minima6 sites
- Phanerogramma heeri6 sites
- Ampliceps furcitibia5 sites
- Archirhyphus asiaticus5 sites
- Archizelmira kazachstanica5 sites
- Blattodea5 sites
- Campterophlebiidae5 sites
- Kararhynchus occiduus5 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 122 sites for Orthophlebiidae, and this reads all of them. Of that, one read hit the database's own return limit, so every count below is a floor rather than a total. 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
55 references- Jurassic scorpionflies (Mecoptera) with swollen first metatarsal segments suggesting sexual dimorphism19
- Neue Untersuchungen über die fossilen Insekten mit Ergänzungen und Nachträgen sowie Ausblicken auf phylogenetische, palaeogeographische und allgemein biologische Probleme. II Teil17
- Materialy po evolyutsii Mecoptera16
- The Panorpoid complex in the British Rhaetic and Lias14
- Yurskie skorpionnitsy yuzhnoj Sibiri i zapadnoy Mongolii12
- Die Insektenfauna des Ostniedersachsischen Oberen Lias12
- Liassic insects from Shurab and Kisyl-Kiya, Part I, Various orders except Blattodea and Coleoptera8
- New Jurassic scorpionflies of the families Orthophlebiidae and Nannochoristidae (Insecta: Mecoptera) from Mongolia and Transbaikalia7
- Mesozoic Insects of Orthophlebiidae (Insecta, Mecoptera) from Junggar Basin, Xinjiang, China7
- Scorpion flies, Panorpida in Pozdne-Mezozoyskie Nasekomye Vostochnogo Zabaykal'ya7
- Skorpionnitsy iz Mezozoyskikh otlozheniy Turgayskoy vpadiny7
- New Triassic scorpionflies (Insecta, Mecoptera) from Kyrgyzstan6
Each of the 216 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. 43 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 Orthophlebiidae
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Yan-jie Zhang, Peter J. M. Shih, Jun-you Wang, Maria E. McNamara, Chungkun Shih, Dong Ren & Tai-ping Gao
- Licence
- CC BY 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Orthophlebiidae 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 itPanorpoidea through timeFormations of the Early JurassicThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Handlirsch 1906)