Taxa
Explore notable groups in the fossil record. Each taxon links to its occurrence data and distribution.
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View the full occurrence record: geographic distribution, geologic timeline, and classification breakdown.
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Featured taxa
A curated selection of notable groups across the fossil record.
Dinosauria
The dominant terrestrial vertebrates of the Mesozoic Era. From tiny feathered hunters to the largest animals to ever walk the Earth.
Trilobita
Ancient marine arthropods that flourished for over 270 million years before vanishing at the end-Permian mass extinction.
Mammalia
Warm-blooded vertebrates defined by hair, live birth, and milk production. Includes everything from bats to whales to humans.
Ammonoidea
Extinct cephalopod mollusks with intricately chambered shells. Prized by collectors and used as index fossils to date rock strata.
Bivalvia
Clams, oysters, and mussels. Bivalves have been filtering sediment from the seafloor for over 500 million years.
Gastropoda
The most species-rich class of mollusks. Snails and slugs have colonised land, sea, and freshwater environments across the globe.
Echinodermata
Sea urchins, starfish, and crinoids. Echinoderms are exclusively marine and share a distinctive five-fold body symmetry.
Aves
Living dinosaurs. Birds are the only surviving lineage of theropod dinosaurs, with a fossil record stretching back to the Jurassic.
Foraminifera
Single-celled protists that build intricate calcium carbonate shells. An essential biostratigraphic tool for dating marine sediments.
Cephalopoda
The most intelligent invertebrates — nautiloids, belemnites, ammonites, and their living descendants: squid and octopuses.
Reptilia
A sprawling vertebrate grade including lizards, snakes, turtles, crocodilians, and extinct marine reptiles and pterosaurs.
Plantae
Land plants have reshaped Earth's atmosphere and built its terrestrial habitats. Their fossil record begins with spores in the Ordovician.
Brachiopoda
Lamp shells — superficially clam-like but phylogenetically distinct. Once dominant on Paleozoic seafloors, now mostly restricted to cold deep water.
Anthozoa
Corals and sea anemones. Reef-building corals have constructed the largest biological structures on Earth across hundreds of millions of years.
Chondrichthyes
Sharks, rays, and chimaeras. Cartilaginous fish with a fossil record stretching back 450 million years, surviving every mass extinction.
Actinopterygii
Ray-finned fish — the most species-rich vertebrate group. From the first bony fish of the Devonian to salmon, tuna, and eels today.
Pterosauria
The first vertebrates to achieve powered flight. Pterosaurs ranged from sparrow-sized to the largest flying animals ever known.
Ichthyosauria
Streamlined marine reptiles that convergently evolved a dolphin-like body plan. They gave birth to live young in the open ocean.
Graptolithina
Colonial organisms that floated in ancient seas. Their distinctive saw-blade fossils are among the most reliable index fossils for Paleozoic strata.
Crinoidea
Sea lilies and feather stars. Crinoids carpeted shallow Paleozoic seafloors so densely that entire limestone formations are composed of their remains.
Bryozoa
Tiny colonial filter feeders that build intricate calcified frameworks. A quiet but abundant presence on marine substrates since the Ordovician.
Ostracoda
Microscopic bivalved crustaceans with one of the richest fossil records of any group. Indispensable for correlating rock layers across continents.
Insecta
The most species-rich class of animals. Insects conquered the land and air in the Devonian and are spectacularly preserved in amber.
Porifera
Sponges — the simplest of all animals. Archaeocyathid sponges built the earliest reefs in the Cambrian and filter the ocean to this day.