Palaeastrum

Ross P. Anderson, Sanaa Mughal and George O. Wedlake · CC BY 4.0 · via Wikidata/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
- EukaryaPBDB
Time the record covers
At most 480 million years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 1200 Mya and 720 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
4 occurrences of Palaeastrum on record. 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
4 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
- Galeros Formation · Chuar Group3
- Nelson Head Formation · Shaler Group1
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The named rock units Palaeastrum has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed.
Found in the same rock
42 taxa- Culcitulisphaera revelata4 sites
- Microlepidopalla mira4 sites
- Squamosphaera colonialica4 sites
- Cerebrosphaera globosa3 sites
- Galerosphaera walcottii3 sites
- Lanulatisphaera laufeldii3 sites
- Leiosphaeridia3 sites
- Synsphaeridium3 sites
- Valeria lophostriata3 sites
- Kaibabia gemmulella2 sites
- Rugosoopsis tenuis2 sites
- Vidalopalla verrucata2 sites
- Volleyballia dehlerae2 sites
- Caelatimurus foveolatus1 site
- Coneosphaera1 site
- Gigantosphaeridium fibratum1 site
- Gyalosphaera1 site
- Herisphaera arbovela1 site
- Leiosphaeridia crassa1 site
- Leiosphaeridia jacutica1 site
- Leiosphaeridia minutissima1 site
- Myxococcoides minor1 site
- Navifusa1 site
- Navifusa majensis1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 4 sites for Palaeastrum, 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
2 references- Systematics of organic-walled microfossils from the ca. 780-740 Ma Chuar Group, Grand Canyon, Arizona3
- Organic-walled microfossils from the late Mesoproterozoic to early Neoproterozoic lower Shaler Supergroup (Arctic Canada): Diversity and biostratigraphic significance1
Each of the 4 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. Each entry links to doi.org. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1

Picture of Palaeastrum
- Source
- Wikidata/Commons
- Credit
- Ross P. Anderson, Sanaa Mughal and George O. Wedlake
- Licence
- CC BY 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Palaeastrum 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.
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itEukarya through time
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Butterfield et al. 1994