Banksia kingii
Banksia kingii is an extinct species of tree or shrub in the plant genus Banksia. It is known only from fossil leaves and fruiting "cones" found in Late Pleistocene sediment at Melaleuca Inlet in western Tasmania. These were discovered by Deny King in the workings of his tin mine. The climate was most likely as cool as or cooler than it is at Melaleuca now, and possibly wetter, over 2400 mm annually.

Uncredited · CC BY-SA 2.5 · via Wikipedia/Commons. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.
On record
Recorded, not inferred- Sits inside
- BanksiaPBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Angiospermae
Time the record covers
At most 2.6 million years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 2.58 Mya and 11.7 ka, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
3 occurrences of Banksia kingii on record, most of them in the Pleistocene. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.
When
3 occurrences- Pleistocene100%
These are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.
Banksia kingii and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Banksia kingii and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
10 taxa- Agastachys2 sites
- Cenarrhenes2 sites
- Eucryphia2 sites
- Hakea2 sites
- Lomatia2 sites
- Banksia strahanensis1 site
- Orites1 site
- Orites truncata1 site
- Telopea1 site
- Telopea strahanensis1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 2 sites for Banksia kingii, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too.
This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.
Entered from
2 references- Early Middle Pleistocene leaves of extinct and extant Proteaceae from western Tasmania, Australia2
- Two new Banksia species from Pleistocene sediments in western Tasmania1
Each of the 3 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. Each entry links to doi.org. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Banksia kingii
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- nobody named on the record
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 2.5
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Banksia kingii was found in Sketchfab.
Smithsonian Open Access and MorphoSource were not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.
The description on this site
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itBanksia through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Jordan and Hill 1991