Pseudococcidae

Mealybugs are insects in the family Pseudococcidae, unarmored scale insects found in moist, warm habitats. Of the more than 2,000 described species, many are considered pests, as they feed on plant juices of greenhouse plants, house plants, and subtropical trees and also act as a vector for several plant diseases. Some ants live in symbiotic relationships with them, protecting them from predators and feeding off the honeydew that they excrete.

Pseudococcidae

Crisco 1492 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · 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
mealybugPBDB
Sits inside
NeococcoideaPBDB
Motility
actively mobilePBDB, for Arthropoda
Environment
terrestrialPBDB, for Insecta

Time the record covers

At least 73 million years on record.

The record covers at least 121.4 Mya to 48.07 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 125.77 Mya to 41.03 Mya.

Early Cretaceous — about 1 of 4 occurrencesEarly CretaceousLate Cretaceous — about 2 of 4 occurrencesLate CretaceousPaleocene — about 0 of 4 occurrencesEocene — about 1 of 4 occurrencesEocene127–125 Mya — about 0.3 occurrences125–122 Mya — about 0.7 occurrences122–119 Mya — about 0.0 occurrences101–98 Mya — about 0.7 occurrences98–95 Mya — about 0.9 occurrences95–92 Mya — about 0.4 occurrences48–45 Mya — about 0.4 occurrences45–42 Mya — about 0.4 occurrences42–39 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences121.4 Mya48.07 Mya127 Mya39 Mya

4 occurrences of Pseudococcidae on record, most of them in the Late Cretaceous. 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

1 formation

Naibuchi — 47.44°N, 142.76°E

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The named rock units Pseudococcidae has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 3 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.

Pseudococcidae and its relatives

Late Cretaceous

Where Pseudococcidae and its relatives were recorded in the Late Cretaceous.

Found in the same rock

545 taxa

The Paleobiology Database records 4 sites for Pseudococcidae, 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

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 Pseudococcidae

Credit
Crisco 1492
Licence
CC BY-SA 4.0
Commercial use
the licence allows it

No 3D scan of Pseudococcidae 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 itNeococcoidea through timeFormations of the Late CretaceousThe world it lived on

Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Heymons 1915