Dictyocha
Searched as Dictyocha fibula rhombica. The Paleobiology Database treats Dictyocha as the accepted name.
Dictyocha is a genus of silicoflagellates, marine photosynthetic unicellular protists that take the form of either flagellates or axopodial amoebae. Described by Ehrenberg in 1837, Dictyocha contains many important species of the marine phytoplankton, some of them responsible for algal blooms that are toxic to fish.

Minami Himemiya · CC BY-SA 3.0 · 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
- DictyochaceaePBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Chrysophyceae
- Life habit
- planktonicPBDB, for Chrysophyceae
- Motility
- passively mobilePBDB, for Chrysophyceae
Time the record covers
At most 32 million years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 33.9 Mya and 2.58 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
2 occurrences of Dictyocha 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 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.
Dictyocha and its relatives
OligoceneWhere Dictyocha and its relatives were recorded in the Oligocene.
Found in the same rock
369 taxa- Thalassionema65 sites
- Lioloma63 sites
- Azpeitia57 sites
- Thalassiosira53 sites
- Nitzschia51 sites
- Actinocyclus41 sites
- Hemidiscus38 sites
- Actinocyclus ellipticus33 sites
- Distephanus speculum33 sites
- Triceratium32 sites
- Ethmodiscus29 sites
- Stephanocha28 sites
- Rhizosolenia24 sites
- Cussia23 sites
- Rossiella23 sites
- Synedra20 sites
- Crucidenticula16 sites
- Coscinodiscus14 sites
- Alveus12 sites
- Asterolampra marylandica12 sites
- Coscinodiscus marginatus12 sites
- Asterolampra11 sites
- Asteromphalus11 sites
- Actinoptychus senarius10 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 104 sites for Dictyocha, 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
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 the Paleobiology Database's own record for the work.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Dictyocha
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Minami Himemiya
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Dictyocha 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, “Dictyocha”
- 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 itDictyochaceae through timeFormations of the OligoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Ehrenberg 1837