Pleurodonta

Searched as Pleurodonta indet.. The Paleobiology Database treats Pleurodonta as the accepted name.

Pleurodonta is one of the two subdivisions of Iguania, the other being Acrodonta. Pleurodonta includes all families previously split from Iguanidae sensu lato, whereas Acrodonta includes Agamidae and Chamaeleonidae. The name Pleurodonta was first used by paleontologist and herpetologist Edward Drinker Cope in 1864, although he used it in a different sense than it is used today. Because of this difference, the name Iguanoidea has been proposed as a replacement for Pleurodonta in phylogenetic nomenclature.

Pleurodonta

Marcel Burkhard/ Cele4 , www.tierlexikon.ch · 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
IguanomorphaPBDB
Motility
actively mobilePBDB, for Osteichthyes
Environment
terrestrialPBDB, for Amniota

Time the record covers

At least 47 million years on record.

The record covers at least 66 Mya to 18.5 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 72.2 Mya to 16.3 Mya.

Late Cretaceous — about 1 of 4 occurrencesLate CretaceousPaleocene — about 0 of 4 occurrencesEocene — about 0 of 4 occurrencesOligocene — about 0 of 4 occurrencesMiocene — about 3 of 4 occurrencesMiocene73–71 Mya — about 0.1 occurrences71–69 Mya — about 0.3 occurrences69–68 Mya — about 0.3 occurrences68–66 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences19–17 Mya — about 2 occurrences17–15 Mya — about 1 occurrence66 Mya18.5 Mya73 Mya15 Mya

4 occurrences of Pleurodonta on record, most of them in the Miocene. 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

4 occurrences

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

2 formations

Arikaree — 43.20°N, 108.20°WAllen — 39.78°S, 66.70°W

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The named rock units Pleurodonta has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed.

Pleurodonta and its relatives

Miocene

Where Pleurodonta and its relatives were recorded in the Miocene.

Found in the same rock

3,518 taxa

The Paleobiology Database records 273 sites for Pleurodonta, and this reads 240 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

2 references

Each of the 4 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 Pleurodonta

Credit
Marcel Burkhard/ Cele4 , www.tierlexikon.ch
Licence
CC BY-SA 3.0
Commercial use
the licence allows it

No 3D scan of Pleurodonta 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

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 itIguanomorpha through timeFormations of the MioceneThe world it lived on

Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Cope 1864)