Peripatidae

Peripatidae
Temporal range:
Scientific classification
Domain: Eukaryota
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Onychophora
Family: Peripatidae
Audouin & Milne-Edwards, 1832
Genera

See text

Global range of Onychophora
  extant Peripatidae
  fossils

Peripatidae is a family of velvet worms. This family includes more than 90 described species distributed among 13 genera, but some authorities deem only 80 of these species to be valid. The oldest putative representatives of the family herald from Burmese amber dated to the mid-Cretaceous, around 100 million years ago, with representatives from Dominican and Baltic amber attesting to a broader distribution in the Palaeogene / Neogene; molecular variability suggests that the family's crown group may have arisen in the early Mesozoic.