Polyxenida

Polyxenida is an order of millipedes readily distinguished by a unique body plan consisting of a soft, non-calcified body ornamented with tufts of bristles. These features have inspired the common names bristly millipedes or pincushion millipedes. This order includes about 148 species in four families worldwide, which represent the only living members of the subclass Penicillata.

Polyxenida

Sarefo · 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
PenicillataPBDB
Motility
actively mobilePBDB, for Arthropoda

Time the record covers

At least 100 million years on record.

The record covers at least 121.4 Mya to 20.45 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 125.77 Mya to 13.82 Mya.

Early Cretaceous — about 3 of 23 occurrencesEarly CretaceousLate Cretaceous — about 11 of 23 occurrencesLate CretaceousPaleocene — about 0 of 23 occurrencesEocene — about 6 of 23 occurrencesEoceneOligocene — about 0 of 23 occurrencesMiocene — about 3 of 23 occurrencesMiocene128–124 Mya — about 1 occurrence124–120 Mya — about 2 occurrences101–97 Mya — about 6 occurrences97–93 Mya — about 5 occurrences39–35 Mya — about 4 occurrences35–31 Mya — about 2 occurrences23–19 Mya — about 0.6 occurrences19–15 Mya — about 2 occurrences15–12 Mya — about 0.5 occurrences121.4 Mya20.45 Mya128 Mya12 Mya

23 occurrences of Polyxenida on record, most of them in the Late Cretaceous. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group, and the chart stops with its fossils rather than at the present. 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

23 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

1 formation

Warkalli — 12.03°N, 75.24°E

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The named rock units Polyxenida has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 22 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.

Polyxenida and its relatives

Late Cretaceous

Where Polyxenida and its relatives were recorded in the Late Cretaceous.

Found in the same rock

2,450 taxa

The Paleobiology Database records 14 sites for Polyxenida, 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

10 references

Each of the 23 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 Polyxenida

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

No 3D scan of Polyxenida 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 itPenicillata through timeFormations of the Late CretaceousThe world it lived on

Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Lucas 1840