Thysanoptera

Thrips, commonly known as thunderflies or thunderbugs, are minute, slender insects with fringed wings and unique asymmetrical mouthparts. Entomologists have described approximately 7,700 species; they are distributed globally with their food plants. They fly only weakly and their feathery wings are unsuitable for conventional flight; instead, thrips exploit an unusual mechanism, clap and fling, to create lift using an unsteady circulation pattern with transient vortices near the wings.

Thysanoptera

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
Also called
thripsPBDB
Sits inside
HolothysanopteraPBDB
Motility
actively mobilePBDB, for Arthropoda
Environment
terrestrialPBDB, for Insecta

Time the record covers

At least 261 million years on record.

The record covers at least 274.4 Mya to 12.8 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 283.3 Mya to 11.63 Mya.

Permian — about 1 of 330 occurrencesPermianEarly Triassic — about 0 of 330 occurrencesMiddle Triassic — about 0 of 330 occurrencesLate Triassic — about 3 of 330 occurrencesLate TriassicEarly Jurassic — about 0 of 330 occurrencesMiddle Jurassic — about 0 of 330 occurrencesLate Jurassic — about 8 of 330 occurrencesEarly Cretaceous — about 26 of 330 occurrencesEarly CretaceousLate Cretaceous — about 30 of 330 occurrencesLate CretaceousPaleocene — about 1 of 330 occurrencesEocene — about 210 of 330 occurrencesOligocene — about 25 of 330 occurrencesMiocene — about 26 of 330 occurrences289–279 Mya — about 0.4 occurrences279–270 Mya — about 0.6 occurrences232–223 Mya — about 0.6 occurrences223–213 Mya — about 1 occurrence213–204 Mya — about 1 occurrence157–147 Mya — about 8 occurrences129–119 Mya — about 12 occurrences119–110 Mya — about 7 occurrences110–100 Mya — about 9 occurrences100–91 Mya — about 26 occurrences91–82 Mya — about 1 occurrence82–72 Mya — about 2 occurrences63–53 Mya — about 2 occurrences53–44 Mya — about 4 occurrences44–34 Mya — about 175 occurrences34–25 Mya — about 46 occurrences25–16 Mya — about 33 occurrences16–6.2 Mya — about 2 occurrences274.4 Mya12.8 Mya289 Mya6 Mya

330 occurrences of Thysanoptera on record, most of them in the Eocene. 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

330 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

18 formations

Barstow — 34.95°N, 116.83°WBarstow — 34.94°N, 116.83°WRott — 50.75°N, 7.26°EBouldnor — 50.74°N, 1.36°WKarabastau — 42.69°N, 70.41°EKarabastau — 42.90°N, 70.00°EEscucha — 40.80°N, 0.81°WEscucha — 42.64°N, 2.72°WEscucha — 41.03°N, 0.56°WNiveau du gypse d'Aix — 43.52°N, 5.45°EZaza — 53.30°N, 112.09°EGreen River — 39.00°N, 108.00°WGreen River — 38.90°N, 109.20°WCow Branch — 36.54°N, 79.67°WArgiles d'lignite du Soissonnais — 49.33°N, 2.66°EUpper Freshwater-Molasse — 47.67°N, 8.93°EKabaw — 21.68°N, 94.08°ELas Penosas — 43.31°N, 4.45°WTologoi — 47.50°N, 85.20°ERaritan — 40.47°N, 74.32°WGurvan-Eren — 46.38°N, 93.95°ESalagou — 43.65°N, 3.32°EChickaloon — 61.74°N, 148.95°W

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The named rock units Thysanoptera has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 246 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.

Thysanoptera and its relatives

Eocene

Where Thysanoptera and its relatives were recorded in the Eocene.

Found in the same rock

3,775 taxa

The Paleobiology Database records 90 sites for Thysanoptera, 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

72 references

Each of the 330 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. 60 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 Thysanoptera

Credit
nobody named on the record
Licence
CC BY-SA 3.0
Commercial use
the licence allows it

No 3D scan of Thysanoptera 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

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 itHolothysanoptera through timeFormations of the EoceneThe world it lived on

Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Haliday 1836