Pachygenelus
Pachygenelus is a genus of extinct cynodont. Fossils have been found from the Karoo basin in South Africa and date back to the Early Jurassic.

Smokeybjb · 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
- TritheledontidaePBDB
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Osteichthyes
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Amniota
Time the record covers
At most 8.5 million years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 201.4 Mya and 192.9 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
12 occurrences of Pachygenelus 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
12 occurrences- Early Jurassic100%
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
3 formations
- Elliot Formation · Stormberg Group8
- McCoy Brook Formation · Meriden Group3
- Elliot Formation · Stormberg Group1
Loading coastlines…
The named rock units Pachygenelus has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed.
Pachygenelus and its relatives
Early JurassicWhere Pachygenelus and its relatives were recorded in the Early Jurassic.
Found in the same rock
12 taxa- Massospondylus5 sites
- Protosuchus micmac3 sites
- Clevosaurus2 sites
- Tritylodon2 sites
- Ammosaurus1 site
- Crocodylia1 site
- Crocodylomorpha1 site
- Lesothosaurus diagnosticus1 site
- Massospondylus carinatus1 site
- Ornithischia1 site
- Syntarsus1 site
- Thecodontia1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 12 sites for Pachygenelus, 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
3 references- Fossils from the Elliot and Clarens Formations (Karoo Sequence) of the northeastern Cape, Orange Free State and Lesotho, and a suggested biozonation based on tetrapods8
- New fossil evidence on the sister-group of mammals and early Mesozoic faunal distributions3
- On a new cynodont from the Stormberg1
Each of the 12 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 Pachygenelus
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Smokeybjb
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Pachygenelus 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 itTritheledontidae through timeFormations of the Early JurassicThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Watson 1913