T. schmidtii C.B.Beck (1957)[1] T. reposana Hammond & Berry (2005)[2] Tetraxylopteris is a genus of extinct vascular plants of the Middle to Upper Devonian (around 390 to 360 million years ago).

[1] T. reposana was found in the Campo Chico Formation, north-west Venezuela, in beds believed to be of Frasnian age (382 to 372 million years ago).

[2][3] They have been called "non-laminate proto-leaves" by Beerling and Fleming, reflecting the belief that such structures were precursors to true leaves, which evolved by first 'planation' – flattening to produce a two-dimensional branched structure – and then 'webbing' – tissue growing out between the flattened branches.

Each ultimate unit had an elongated sporangium at its end which split longitudinally to release the spores which were trilete, ranging from around 70 to 170 μm in diameter.

Hammond and Berry suggest that T. reposana may have grown in dense thickets so that plants supported one another.

In 1960, Beck created the name Progymnospermopsida for a class of plants which reproduced in a similar way to ferns, but had stems whose internal structure resembled gymnosperms.

(The former order had earlier been proposed by Kräusel & Weyland in 1941 for taxa ancestral to both ferns and pteridosperms.)

The specific epithet reposana is derived from 'El Reposo', the name of the hacienda near the fossil locality.

[2] A cladogram published in 2004 by Crane et al. places Tetraxylopteris in a paraphyletic stem group, basal to the seed plants (spermatophytes).