Oedogonium
Oedogonium is a genus of filamentous, free-living green algae. It was first described in 1820 by Johann Heinrich Friedrich Link, and later given its name by German scientist K. E. Hirn.

Uncredited · 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
- OedogoniaceaePBDB
Time the record covers
At most 11 million years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 72.2 Mya and 61.66 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
10 occurrences of Oedogonium on record, most of them in the Late Cretaceous. 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
10 occurrences- Late Cretaceous90%
- Paleocene10%
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
3 formations
Loading coastlines…
The named rock units Oedogonium has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed.
Oedogonium and its relatives
Late CretaceousWhere Oedogonium and its relatives were recorded in the Late Cretaceous.
Found in the same rock
214 taxa- Lecaniella8 sites
- Ovoidites grandis8 sites
- Longapertites patagonicus7 sites
- Botryococcus braunii6 sites
- Ovoidites parvus6 sites
- Pediastrum boryanum6 sites
- Catinipollis geiseltalensis5 sites
- Biretisporites4 sites
- Deltoidospora4 sites
- Phyllocladidites mawsonii4 sites
- Tripunctisporis maastrichtiensis4 sites
- Zignematales indet.4 sites
- Acylomurus silviae3 sites
- Apiosporaceae indet.3 sites
- Azolla andreisii3 sites
- Azolla coloniensis3 sites
- Biretisporites crassilabratus3 sites
- Botryococcus3 sites
- Camarozonosporites3 sites
- Camarozonosporites ambigens3 sites
- Camarozonosporites amplus3 sites
- Ceratosporites equalis3 sites
- Chomotriletes minor3 sites
- Cibotiidites auriculatus3 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 10 sites for Oedogonium, 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
3 references- Maastrichtian palaeoenvironments and palaeoclimate reconstruction in southern South America (Patagonia, Argentina) based on fossil fungi and algae using open data resources6
- New South American record of the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary interval (La Colonia Formation, Patagonia, Argentina)3
- Palynology of the Jagüel Formation (Maastrichtian-Danian) in northwestern Río Negro, Neuquén Basin, Argentina: paleobiogeographic inferences1
Each of the 10 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 doi.org. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Oedogonium
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- nobody named on the record
- Licence
- not stated by the source
- Commercial use
- cannot be read from the licence given — check the record
No 3D scan of Oedogonium 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
- Source
- Wikipedia, “Oedogonium”
- 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 itOedogoniaceae through timeFormations of the Late CretaceousThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Link ex Hirn 1900