Guildayichthyiformes
Guildayichthyidae is an extinct family of marine fish from the Mississippian Bear Gulch Limestone of Montana. It is the only family in the order Guildayichthyiformes. Guildayichthyids possess an uncommon mixture of primitive and modern characteristics in their skull bones.

Gyik Toma (Tommy the paleobear) from Romania · 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
- ActinopterygiiPBDB
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Osteichthyes
Time the record covers
At most 6.9 million years on record.
The one occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 330.3 Mya and 323.4 Mya, which is a dating window rather than a span.
1 occurrence of Guildayichthyiformes on record, most of them in the Carboniferous. 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
1 occurrences- Carboniferous100%
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
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The named rock units Guildayichthyiformes has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed.
Guildayichthyiformes and its relatives
CarboniferousWhere Guildayichthyiformes and its relatives were recorded in the Carboniferous.
Found in the same rock
25 taxa- Amphicentrum1 site
- Bradyodontida1 site
- Cephalopoda1 site
- Conodonta1 site
- Crurithyris1 site
- Deltoptychius1 site
- Denaea1 site
- Dithyrocaris1 site
- Falcatus1 site
- Frederichthys1 site
- Gastropoda1 site
- Helodus1 site
- Iniopterygia1 site
- Megalichthys1 site
- Myalina1 site
- Nautiloidea1 site
- Orestiacanthus1 site
- Plantae1 site
- Posidonia1 site
- Rhizodopsis1 site
- Spirorbis1 site
- Streblochondria1 site
- Tyrannophontes1 site
- Woodichthys1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 1 site for Guildayichthyiformes, 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 1 occurrence 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 Guildayichthyiformes
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Gyik Toma (Tommy the paleobear) from Romania
- Licence
- CC BY 2.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Guildayichthyiformes 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 itActinopterygii through timeFormations of the CarboniferousThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Lund 2000