Cedrela
Cedrela is a genus of several species in the mahogany family, Meliaceae. They are evergreen or dry-season deciduous trees with pinnate leaves, native to the tropical and subtropical New World, from southern Mexico to northern Argentina.

Forest & Kim Starr · CC BY 3.0 · 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
- MeliaceaePBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Angiospermae
Time the record covers
At least 44 million years on record.
The record covers at least 48.07 Mya to 3.6 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 66 Mya to 2.58 Mya.
35 occurrences of Cedrela on record, most of them in the Miocene. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group, and the chart stops with its fossils rather than at the present. 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
35 occurrencesThese 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.
Found in
12 formations
- John Day Formation4
- Florissant Formation4
- Valentine Formation · Ogallala Group2
- Motojuku Formation1
- Renova Formation1
- Green River Formation1
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The named rock units Cedrela has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 16 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Cedrela and its relatives
MioceneWhere Cedrela and its relatives were recorded in the Miocene.
Found in the same rock
666 taxa- Quercus13 sites
- Mahonia11 sites
- Eugenia10 sites
- Typha lesquereuxi10 sites
- Carya9 sites
- Chamaecyparis9 sites
- Rhus9 sites
- Salix9 sites
- Acer8 sites
- Castanea8 sites
- Crataegus8 sites
- Koelreuteria8 sites
- Persea8 sites
- Picea8 sites
- Pinus8 sites
- Pinus florissanti8 sites
- Prunus8 sites
- Alnus7 sites
- Astronium7 sites
- Cercis parvifolia7 sites
- Cercocarpus7 sites
- Fraxinus7 sites
- Populus7 sites
- Robinia7 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 23 sites for Cedrela, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too. The 24 sharing the most are listed.
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
20 references- The Oligocene Bridge Creek flora of the John Day Formation, Oregon5
- Fossil Plants of the Florissant Beds of Colorado5
- Fossil Plants of the Tertiary Beaverhead Basins in Southwestern Montana4
- The Tertiary flora of the island of Trinidad, B. W. I.3
- The Kilgore Flora: A Late Miocene Flora from Northern Nebraska2
- Tertiary flora from the Rio Pichileufu, Argentina2
- The Early Miocene Buffalo Canyon Flora of Western Nevada1
- Late Miocene and Pliocene Floras in Central Honshu, Japan1
- Miocene Floras From the Middlegate Basin, West-Central Nevada1
- The Eocene Germer Basin Flora of South-Central Idaho1
- The Metzel Ranch Flora of the Upper Ruby River Basin, Southwestern Montana1
- The Miocene Temblor Flora of West Central California1
Each of the 35 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. 8 further references are not listed. Entries link to doi.org where the Paleobiology Database holds an identifier, and to its own record where it does not. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Cedrela
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Forest & Kim Starr
- Licence
- CC BY 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Cedrela was found in MorphoSource and Sketchfab.
Smithsonian Open Access was not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.
The description on this site
- Source
- Wikipedia, “Cedrela”
- 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 itMeliaceae through timeFormations of the MioceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Browne 1756