Thyrsopteris

Thyrsopteris is a genus of tree fern. It contains a single living species, Thyrsopteris elegans, endemic to the Juan Fernandez Archipelago off the coast of Chile.

Thyrsopteris

Edward Joseph Lowe · Public Domain · 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
ThyrsopteridaceaePBDB
Diet
"photoautotroph"PBDB, for Streptophyta

Time the record covers

At least 153 million years on record.

The record covers at least 237 Mya to 83.6 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 241.464 Mya to 66 Mya.

Middle Triassic — about 1 of 3 occurrencesLate Triassic — about 0 of 3 occurrencesEarly Jurassic — about 0 of 3 occurrencesMiddle Jurassic — about 0 of 3 occurrencesLate Jurassic — about 0 of 3 occurrencesEarly Cretaceous — about 0 of 3 occurrencesLate Cretaceous — about 2 of 3 occurrencesLate CretaceousPaleocene — about 0 of 3 occurrences245–239 Mya — about 0.6 occurrences239–233 Mya — about 0.4 occurrences105–99 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences99–93 Mya — about 0.8 occurrences87–81 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences81–75 Mya — about 0.3 occurrences75–69 Mya — about 0.3 occurrences69–62 Mya — about 0.1 occurrences237 Mya83.6 Mya245 Mya62 Mya

3 occurrences of Thyrsopteris 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

3 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

Half Three Point — 62.18°S, 58.97°W

Loading coastlines…

The named rock units Thyrsopteris has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 2 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.

Thyrsopteris and its relatives

Late Cretaceous

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

Found in the same rock

13 taxa

The Paleobiology Database records 2 sites for Thyrsopteris, 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

Each of the 3 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 Thyrsopteris

Credit
Edward Joseph Lowe
Licence
Public Domain
Commercial use
the licence allows it

No 3D scan of Thyrsopteris 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 itThyrsopteridaceae through timeFormations of the Late CretaceousThe world it lived on

Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Kunze 1834