Dipteridaceae
The Dipteridaceae is a family of ferns in the order Gleicheniales of the class Polypodiopsida. They are commonly known as umbrella ferns and contain two genera, Cheiropleuria and Dipteris, with a total of nine species confined to Asia, New Guinea and northern Australia While currently a small family, they were much more abundant in the Mesozoic era, with the oldest fossils being known from the Middle Triassic of Italy, Australia and Argentina. A number of fossil genera are recognised, including Hausmannia, Clathropteris, Dictyophyllum, Sewardalea, Thaumatopteris, Camptopteris, Patagoniapteris, Goeppertella, and Polyphacelus.

Uncredited · GFDL · 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
- GleichenialesPBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Streptophyta
Time the record covers
At least 171 million years on record.
The record covers at least 237 Mya to 66 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 251.902 Mya to 61.66 Mya.
641 occurrences of Dipteridaceae on record, most of them in the Late Triassic. 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
641 occurrences- Early Triassicunder 1%
- Middle Triassic1%
- Late Triassic39%
- Early Jurassic30%
- Middle Jurassic14%
- Late Jurassic7%
- Early Cretaceous6%
- Late Cretaceous3%
- Paleoceneunder 1%
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
191 formations
- Cape Stewart Formation29
- Steierdorf Formation15
- Novorayskaya Suite Formation10
- Bearreraig Sandstone Formation8
- Bagong Formation8
- Amisan Formation6
Loading coastlines…
The named rock units Dipteridaceae has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 167 further formations hold fewer occurrences each and are not listed. 235 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Dipteridaceae and its relatives
Late TriassicWhere Dipteridaceae and its relatives were recorded in the Late Triassic.
Found in the same rock
484 taxa- Cladophlebis187 sites
- Dictyophyllum148 sites
- Podozamites145 sites
- Equisetites129 sites
- Neocalamites125 sites
- Nilsonia121 sites
- Pterophyllum115 sites
- Clathropteris111 sites
- Todites97 sites
- Taeniopteris92 sites
- Coniopteris80 sites
- Sphenobaiera74 sites
- Thaumatopteris74 sites
- Baiera73 sites
- Phlebopteris73 sites
- Phoenicopsis73 sites
- Czekanowskia71 sites
- Hausmannia68 sites
- Anomozamites65 sites
- Otozamites64 sites
- Elatocladus62 sites
- Pityophyllum60 sites
- Ctenis50 sites
- Sagenopteris48 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 381 sites for Dipteridaceae, and this reads 240 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
191 references- The Stratigraphic Tables of Sichuan40
- Triassic Floras of Eurasia36
- Stratigraphic relations of the plant beds29
- Early Jurassic land flora of the Getic Nappe24
- About subdivisions of the Lower Jurassic of Tadzhikistan based on paleobotanic data22
- The Stratigraphic Tables of Central South China14
- O srodkowoliasowym wieku flory z Chmielowa pod Ostrowcem i jej znaczeniu dla stratygrafii kontynentalnej jury [On the Middle Liassic age of the flora from Chmielow, near Ostrowiec (central Poland) and its significance for stratigraphy of the continental Jurassic]13
- The Stratigraphic Tables of Yunnan11
- Mesozoic floral succession of Nagato Mountainland, western Japan11
- Aptian-Turonian palynology of the Ghazalat-1 well (GTX-1), Qattara Depression, Egypt10
- Regional Geology of Fujian Province10
- Triassic Floras of Eurasia9
Each of the 641 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. 179 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 Dipteridaceae
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- nobody named on the record
- Licence
- GFDL
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Dipteridaceae 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 itGleicheniales through timeFormations of the Late TriassicThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Seward and Dale