Gelechioidea
Gelechioidea is the superfamily of moths that contains the case-bearers, twirler moths, and relatives, also simply called curved-horn moths or gelechioid moths. It is a large and poorly understood '"micromoth" superfamily, constituting one of the basal lineages of the Ditrysia.

Donald Hobern · CC BY 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- Sits inside
- ApoditrysiaPBDB
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Arthropoda
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Insecta
Time the record covers
At least 25 million years on record.
The record covers at least 48.07 Mya to 23.04 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 56 Mya to 15.98 Mya.
40 occurrences of Gelechioidea 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
40 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
5 formations
- Mazantic Shale Formation · Simojovel Group2
- Green River Formation1
- Florissant Formation1
- Bouldnor Formation · Solent Group1
- Rott Formation1
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The named rock units Gelechioidea has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 34 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Gelechioidea and its relatives
EoceneWhere Gelechioidea and its relatives were recorded in the Eocene.
Found in the same rock
1,711 taxa- Balticoroma serafinorum4 sites
- Culicoides4 sites
- Dasyhelea4 sites
- Forcipomyia (Forcipomyia)4 sites
- Gesomyrmex hoernesi4 sites
- Plagiolepis klinsmanni4 sites
- Prenolepis henschei4 sites
- Yantaromyrmex geinitzi4 sites
- Anaphothrips parallelus3 sites
- Archaea paradoxa3 sites
- Brachypogon (Isohelea)3 sites
- Ceratopogon3 sites
- Ceratopogon forcipiformis3 sites
- Ceratopogon hennigi3 sites
- Ctenobethylus goepperti3 sites
- Culicoides speciosus3 sites
- Dicranopalpus ramiger3 sites
- Eohelea sinuosa3 sites
- Eomortoniellus handlirschi3 sites
- Forcipomyia (Forcipomyia) gedanicola3 sites
- Forcipomyia (Lasiohelea)3 sites
- Gelechiidae3 sites
- Germaraphis dryoides3 sites
- Gnamptogenys europaea3 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 16 sites for Gelechioidea, 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
14 references- Bernstein-Lepidopteren9
- Kuznetsov, 19416
- First records of species of Gelechioidae from Bitterfeld amber (Insecta, Lepidoptera) and notes on two gelechioid species from Baltic amber5
- New Moth-Like Lepidoptera from the Baltic Amber5
- Studies on the Lepidoptera from fossil resins part I. General remarks and descriptions of new genera and species of the families Tineidae and Oecophoridae from the Baltic amber3
- Bernstein-Lepidopteren (aus der Sammlung Bachofen-Echt)3
- Systematic, palaeoecology, and palaeobiogeography of the insect fauna from Mexican amber2
- Fossil Insects from the Bembridge Marls, Palaeogene of the Isle of Wight, Southern England1
- Study on the Lepidoptera from fossil resins. Part VII Palaeodepressaria hannemanni gen. et spec. nov. (Oecophoridae) from the Baltic amber1
- Studies on the Lepidoptera from fossil resins. Part II. Epiborkausenites obscurotrimaculatus gen. et sp. nov. (Oecophoridae) and a tineid-moth discovered in the Baltic amber1
- Microlepidopterous larvae in Baltic amber1
- A second moth from the Colorado Eocene1
Each of the 40 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. 2 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 Gelechioidea
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Donald Hobern
- Licence
- CC BY 2.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Gelechioidea was found in MorphoSource and Sketchfab.
Smithsonian Open Access was 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 itApoditrysia through timeFormations of the EoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Stainton 1854