The fossil was discovered in the Woodford Shale, exposed at the Ryan Quarry, in Pontotoc County, Oklahoma. The Woodford Shale is a dark-colored siliceous shale which outcrops to the north-east and the south-west of the Arbuckle Mountains in Oklahoma. It contains radiolarians, conodonts, sponge spicules, ammonoid and nautiloid cephalopods, inarticulate brachiopods [...] and small phyllocarid arthropods, and spans the Devonian-Carboniferous boundary. The strata which produced Aciculopoda are thought on the basis of conodont biostratigraphy to be from the Famennian.