Platyhelminthes

Platyhelminthes is a phylum of relatively simple bilaterian, unsegmented, soft-bodied invertebrates commonly called flatworms or flat worms. Being acoelomates, and having no specialised circulatory and respiratory organs, they are restricted to having flattened shapes that allow oxygen and nutrients to pass through their bodies by diffusion. The digestive cavity has only one opening for both ingestion and egestion ; as a result, the food can not be processed continuously.

Platyhelminthes

OJJ · CC BY-SA 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
PlatyzoaPBDB

Time the record covers

At least 515 million years on record.

The record covers at least 516 Mya to 129 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 521 Mya to 11.7 ka.

Cambrian — about 1 of 6 occurrencesCambrianOrdovician — about 0 of 6 occurrencesSilurian — about 0 of 6 occurrencesDevonian — about 0 of 6 occurrencesCarboniferous — about 0 of 6 occurrencesPermian — about 0 of 6 occurrencesEarly Triassic — about 0 of 6 occurrencesMiddle Triassic — about 1 of 6 occurrencesLate Triassic — about 0 of 6 occurrencesEarly Jurassic — about 0 of 6 occurrencesMiddle Jurassic — about 0 of 6 occurrencesLate Jurassic — about 0 of 6 occurrencesEarly Cretaceous — about 1 of 6 occurrencesLate Cretaceous — about 1 of 6 occurrencesPaleocene — about 0 of 6 occurrencesEocene — about 0 of 6 occurrencesOligocene — about 0 of 6 occurrencesMiocene — about 0 of 6 occurrencesPliocene — about 0 of 6 occurrencesPleistocene — about 2 of 6 occurrences531–514 Mya — about 1 occurrence248–230 Mya — about 1 occurrence142–124 Mya — about 0.3 occurrences124–106 Mya — about 0.7 occurrences106–89 Mya — about 1 occurrence18–0 Mya — about 2 occurrences516 Mya129 ka531 Mya0 Mya

6 occurrences of Platyhelminthes on record, most of them in the Pleistocene. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group. 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

6 occurrences

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

Buen — 82.63°N, 32.50°WSainte-Barbe Clays — 50.48°N, 3.65°EMeissner — 50.94°N, 11.25°E

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The named rock units Platyhelminthes has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 3 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.

Platyhelminthes and its relatives

Pleistocene

Where Platyhelminthes and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.

Found in the same rock

844 taxa

The Paleobiology Database records 6 sites for Platyhelminthes, 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

5 references

Each of the 6 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 Platyhelminthes

Credit
OJJ
Licence
CC BY-SA 4.0
Commercial use
the licence allows it

No 3D scan of Platyhelminthes 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

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 itPlatyzoa through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on

Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Gegenbaur 1859)