It was originally erected by the Swiss naturalist Pierre Revilliod as Archaeonycterididae to hold the genus Archaeonycteris.

[3][4] They existed from the Ypresian to the Lutetian ages of the Middle Eocene epoch (55.8 to 40.4 million years ago).

[1] The family is known to closely resemble modern bat species from the well preserved specimens found in the Messel Pit Fossil Site in Germany.

Other discoveries were made in Europe and other areas of the Northern Hemisphere that restricted the known distribution range to sites associated with the Laurasian land mass.

This range of the family was extended to include a species found in 1990 at the Murgon fossil site on the Australian continent, and they appear to have become globally dispersed during the early Miocene.