Biphyllidae

Biphyllidae, or false skin beetles, are a family of beetles, in the superfamily Cleroidea. They have a cosmopolitan distribution. About 195 species are known. They live under the bark of dead trees and in leaf litter, and are mycophagous, feeding on fungi.

Biphyllidae

Udo Schmidt from Deutschland · CC BY-SA 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
Also called
false skin beetlePBDB
Sits inside
CleroideaPBDB
Motility
actively mobilePBDB, for Arthropoda
Environment
terrestrialPBDB, for Insecta

Time the record covers

At least 45 million years on record.

The record covers at least 83.6 Mya to 37.71 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 85.7 Mya to 33.9 Mya.

Late Cretaceous — about 1 of 6 occurrencesLate CretaceousPaleocene — about 0 of 6 occurrencesEocene — about 5 of 6 occurrencesEoceneOligocene — about 0 of 6 occurrences87–85 Mya — about 0.4 occurrences85–83 Mya — about 0.6 occurrences38–36 Mya — about 2 occurrences36–35 Mya — about 2 occurrences35–33 Mya — about 1.0 occurrences83.6 Mya37.71 Mya87 Mya33 Mya

6 occurrences of Biphyllidae on record, most of them in the Eocene. 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

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

1 formation

Kheta — 71.31°N, 99.56°E

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The named rock units Biphyllidae 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.

Biphyllidae and its relatives

Eocene

Where Biphyllidae and its relatives were recorded in the Eocene.

Found in the same rock

299 taxa

The Paleobiology Database records 5 sites for Biphyllidae, 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

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 Biphyllidae

Credit
Udo Schmidt from Deutschland
Licence
CC BY-SA 2.0
Commercial use
the licence allows it

No 3D scan of Biphyllidae 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 itCleroidea through timeFormations of the EoceneThe world it lived on

Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Leconte 1861