Apionidae
Apioninae is a subfamily of pear-shaped weevils in the family of beetles known as Brentidae. There are at least 20 genera and 80 described species in Apioninae. They feed on living vegetation and sometimes on galls, making them occasional pests or tools of biological control.

Slimguy · CC BY 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
- CurculionoideaPBDB
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Arthropoda
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Insecta
Time the record covers
At least 40 million years on record.
The record covers at least 41.03 Mya to 129 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 48.07 Mya to 11.7 ka.
9 occurrences of Apionidae 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
9 occurrences- Eocene11%
- Oligocene11%
- Pleistocene78%
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
4 formations
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The named rock units Apionidae has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 5 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Apionidae and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Apionidae and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
220 taxa- Curtonotus alpinus7 sites
- Morychus viridis7 sites
- Pterostichus (Cryobius)7 sites
- Cholevinus sibiricus6 sites
- Hypera ornata6 sites
- Stephanocleonus eruditus5 sites
- Aphodius4 sites
- Bembidion4 sites
- Chrysolina rufilabris4 sites
- Isochnus arcticus4 sites
- Lepyrus nordenskioldi4 sites
- Pterostichus tundrae4 sites
- Sitona borealis4 sites
- Agathidium marginatum3 sites
- Eutrichapion rectirostre3 sites
- Phyllobius3 sites
- Poecilus nearcticus3 sites
- Pterostichus sublaevis3 sites
- Stephanocleonus fossulatus3 sites
- Tachinus arcticus3 sites
- Troglocollops arcticus3 sites
- Agabus2 sites
- Caenocara bovistae2 sites
- Carabus (Aulonocarabus) truncaticollis2 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 9 sites for Apionidae, 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
3 references- Late Cenozoic insects of northern Eurasia7
- Tertiary weevils (Insecta, Coleoptera: Curculionoidea), identified from collections of the Senckenberg Museum1
- Systematische und palökologische Untersuchungen an Insekten aus dem Mittel-Eozän der Grube messel bei Darmstadt1
Each of the 9 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 Apionidae
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Slimguy
- Licence
- CC BY 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan was found. Smithsonian Open Access, MorphoSource and Sketchfab were all searched.
The description on this site
- Source
- Wikipedia, “Apioninae”
- 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 itCurculionoidea through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Schoenherr 1823