Charniidae
Charniidae is a family of rangeomorphs. It is the only non-monotypic family of Rangeomorpha.

Smith609 at English Wikipedia · CC BY 2.5 · 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
- RangeomorphaPBDB
Time the record covers
At most 97 million years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 635 Mya and 538.8 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
61 occurrences of Charniidae on record. 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
61 occurrencesThese 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
16 formations
- Mistaken Point Formation · Conception Group13
- Bradgate Formation · Maplewell Group7
- Fermeuse Formation · St John's Group7
- Trepassey Formation · St John's Group7
- Dengying Formation6
- Drook Formation · Conception Group3
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The named rock units Charniidae has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed.
Found in the same rock
147 taxa- Charnia masoni31 sites
- Charniodiscus14 sites
- Aspidella13 sites
- Bradgatia linfordensis13 sites
- Charnia13 sites
- Primocandelabrum13 sites
- Aspidella terranovica12 sites
- Fractofusus andersoni9 sites
- Ivesheadia lobata7 sites
- Thectardis avalonensis7 sites
- Vinlandia antecedens7 sites
- Beothukis mistakensis6 sites
- Hiemalora stellaris6 sites
- Primocandelabrum hiemaloranum6 sites
- Trepassia wardae6 sites
- Arborea arborea5 sites
- Arborea spinosa5 sites
- Charnia gracilis5 sites
- Charniodiscus procerus5 sites
- Pectinifrons abyssalis5 sites
- Animalia4 sites
- Culmofrons plumosa4 sites
- Hadrynichorde catalinensis4 sites
- Hadryniscala avalonica4 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 48 sites for Charniidae, 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
29 references- Ediacaran biota on Bonavista Peninsula, Newfoundland, Canada11
- Morphology and taphonomy of an Ediacaran frond: Charnia from the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland6
- The rangeomorph fossil Charnia from the Ediacaran Shibantan biota in the Yangtze Gorges area, South China5
- Ediacaran endlings from the Avalon Assemblage and the severity of the Kotlin Crisis: First documentation of the Inner Meadow Lagerstätte, Newfoundland, Canada3
- A Chronostratigraphic Framework for the Rise of the Ediacaran Macrobiota: New Constraints from Mistaken Point Ecological Reserve, Newfoundland3
- The Shibantan Lagerstätte: insights into the Proterozoic–Phanerozoic transition3
- Ediacaran fossils from the Precambrian (Charnian Supergroup) of Charnwood Forest, Leicestershire, England3
- The Quanjishan Charnia assemblage from the northern Qaidam Basin, Tibetan Plateau, and implications for palaeoecology and taphonomy of Ediacaran fronds2
- Further Precambrian (Ediacaran) fossil discoveries in Charnwood Forest, Leicestershire2
- How well do fossil assemblages of the Ediacara Biota tell time?2
- Life after snowball: The oldest complex Ediacaran fossils2
- Age of Neoproterozoic bilatarian body and trace fossils, White Sea, Russia: implications for metazoan evolution2
Each of the 61 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. 17 further references are not listed. 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 Charniidae
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Smith609 at English Wikipedia
- Licence
- CC BY 2.5
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Charniidae 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
- Source
- Wikipedia, “Charniidae”
- 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 itRangeomorpha through time
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Glaessner 1979