Ptychadenidae
Ptychadenidae is a family of frogs commonly known as the grassland frogs. These frogs occur in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Brian Gratwicke from DC, USA · CC BY 2.0 · 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
- RanoideaPBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB, for Temnospondyli
- Life habit
- amphibiousPBDB, for Temnospondyli
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Temnospondyli
- Environment
- brackish,freshwater,terrestrialPBDB, for Tetrapoda
Time the record covers
At most 4.3 million years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 27.3 Mya and 23.04 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
2 occurrences of Ptychadenidae on record, most of them in the Oligocene. 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
2 occurrences- Oligocene100%
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
- Nsungwe Formation · Red Sandstone Group2
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The named rock units Ptychadenidae has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed.
Ptychadenidae and its relatives
OligoceneWhere Ptychadenidae and its relatives were recorded in the Oligocene.
Found in the same rock
4 taxa- Colubroidea2 sites
- Booidea1 site
- Pakakali rukwaensis1 site
- Rukwanyoka holmani1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 2 sites for Ptychadenidae, 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
1 referenceEach of the 2 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 Ptychadenidae
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Brian Gratwicke from DC, USA
- Licence
- CC BY 2.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Ptychadenidae 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 itRanoidea through timeFormations of the OligoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Dubois 1987)