Osmylidae
Osmylidae are a small family of winged insects of the net-winged insect order Neuroptera. The osmylids, also called lance lacewings, stream lacewings or giant lacewings, are found all over the world except North and Central America. There are around 225 extant species.

Donald Hobern from Canberra, Australia · 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- Also called
- lance lacewingPBDB
- Sits inside
- OsmyloideaPBDB
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Arthropoda
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Insecta
Time the record covers
At least 180 million years on record.
The record covers at least 192.9 Mya to 12.8 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 201.4 Mya to 11.63 Mya.
98 occurrences of Osmylidae on record, most of them in the Late Jurassic. 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
98 occurrences- Early Jurassic11%
- Middle Jurassic14%
- Late Jurassic35%
- Early Cretaceous14%
- Late Cretaceous7%
- Eocene16%
- Oligocene1%
- Miocene1%
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
20 formations
- Daohugou Formation24
- Karabastau Formation14
- Florissant Formation7
- Sharteg Formation4
- Durlston Formation · Purbeck Group4
- Itat Formation4
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The named rock units Osmylidae has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 16 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Osmylidae and its relatives
Late JurassicWhere Osmylidae and its relatives were recorded in the Late Jurassic.
Found in the same rock
4,244 taxa- Ampliceps furcitibia7 sites
- Archirhyphus asiaticus7 sites
- Oxycorynoides (Oxycorynoides) similis7 sites
- Procramptonomyia kovalevi7 sites
- Protoscelis jurassica7 sites
- Protoscelis longicornis7 sites
- Ampliceps dubius6 sites
- Codemus synaptoides6 sites
- Distenorrhinus (Distenorrhinus) pallidirostris6 sites
- Liassothrips crassipes6 sites
- Paramesopsocus adibi6 sites
- Polyanka minuta6 sites
- Praemacrochile ansorgei6 sites
- Protoscelis nitidicornis6 sites
- Ampliceps dentitibia5 sites
- Ampliceps tenuirostris5 sites
- Belonotaris (Belonotaris) punctatissimus5 sites
- Blattogryllus karatavicus5 sites
- Codemus alatus5 sites
- Eoptychopterina karatavica5 sites
- Hydrokhoohydra aquabella5 sites
- Kararhynchus occiduus5 sites
- Platyelater reflexicollis5 sites
- Probelus (Probelus) longitarsus5 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 56 sites for Osmylidae, and this reads all of them. Of that, one read hit the database's own return limit, so every count below is a floor rather than a total. 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
50 references- Lacewings of the family Osmylidae (Insecta: Neuroptera) from the Upper Jurassic of Asia10
- New Protosmylinae (Neuroptera: Osmylidae) from the early Eocene of western North America, with taxonomic remarks5
- Early osmylids (Neuroptera: Osmylidae) from the Lower-Middle Jurassic of Kyrgyzstan5
- New representatives of the Neuropterans (Neuroptera) from the Jurassic of the Karatau region5
- A review of the lance lacewings (Neuroptera: Osmylidae) from the mid-Cretaceous amber of Myanmar4
- Lacewings (Insecta: Neuroptera) from the Lower Cretaceous Purbeck Limestone Group of southern England4
- The Khasurty fossil insect Lagerstätte3
- Jurassic lacewings (Insecta: Neuroptera) of western Siberia3
- Mesozoic diversity of relict subfamily Kempyninae (Neuroptera: Osmylidae)3
- New Middle Jurassic kempynin osmylid lacewings from China3
- A new genus of Protosmylinae from the Middle Jurassic of China (Neuroptera: Osmylidae)3
- A split-footed lacewing and two epiosmylines from the Jurassic of China (Neuroptera)3
Each of the 98 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. 38 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 Osmylidae
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Donald Hobern from Canberra, Australia
- Licence
- CC BY 2.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Osmylidae 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
- Source
- Wikipedia, “Osmylidae”
- 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 itOsmyloidea through timeFormations of the Late JurassicThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Leach 1815