Nephrolepis
Nephrolepis is a genus of about 30 species of ferns. It is the only genus in the family Nephrolepidaceae, placed in the suborder Aspleniineae of the order Polypodiales in the Pteridophyte Phylogeny Group classification of 2016. Species in this genus include plants commonly referred to as Boston ferns. The fronds are long and narrow, and once-pinnate, in the case of one Bornean species reaching thirty feet in length.
Uncredited · 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
- NephrolepidaceaePBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Streptophyta
Time the record covers
At most 2.6 million years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 2.58 Mya and 0 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
17 occurrences of Nephrolepis on record, most of them in the Pleistocene. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group. 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
17 occurrences- Pleistocene80%
- Holocene20%
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.
Nephrolepis and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Nephrolepis and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
258 taxa- Sapindaceae16 sites
- Asteraceae15 sites
- Celtis15 sites
- Eucalyptus15 sites
- Macaranga15 sites
- Mallotus15 sites
- Monolete15 sites
- Poaceae15 sites
- Podocarpus15 sites
- Rapanea15 sites
- Trema15 sites
- Urticaceae15 sites
- Argyrodendron14 sites
- Elaeocarpus14 sites
- Rutaceae14 sites
- Acacia13 sites
- Callitris13 sites
- Chenopodiaceae13 sites
- Dodonaea13 sites
- Agathis12 sites
- Araucaria12 sites
- Cunoniaceae12 sites
- Dacrydium12 sites
- Drynaria12 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 17 sites for Nephrolepis, 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
4 references- A complete pollen record of the last 230 ka from Lynch's Crater, north-eastern Australia10
- A Late Pleistocene and Holocene pollen diagram from Lynch’s Crater, northeastern Queensland, Australia5
- Exceptionally well preserved late Quaternary plant and vertebrate fossils from a blue hole on Abaco, The Bahamas1
- A Catalogue of Fossil Plants from India Part 6: Cenozoic (Quaternary) Palynology and Palaeobotany1
Each of the 17 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. 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 content2
Picture of Nephrolepis
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- nobody named on the record
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
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, “Nephrolepis”
- 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 itNephrolepidaceae through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Schott 1834