Cornaceae
The Cornaceae, the dogwood family, are a cosmopolitan family of flowering plants in the order Cornales. The family contains approximately 85 species in two genera, Alangium and Cornus. They are mostly trees and shrubs, which may be deciduous or evergreen, although a few species are perennial herbs. Members of the family usually have opposite or alternate simple leaves, four- or five-parted flowers clustered in inflorescences or pseudanthia, and drupaceous fruits. The family is primarily distributed in northern temperate regions and tropical Asia. In northern temperate areas, Cornaceae are well known from the dogwoods Cornus.

Lapplaender · CC BY-SA 2.0 de · 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
- CornalesPBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Angiospermae
Time the record covers
At least 65 million years on record.
The record covers at least 66 Mya to 129 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 100.5 Mya to 11.7 ka.
334 occurrences of Cornaceae on record, most of them in the Miocene. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group. 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
334 occurrences- Late Cretaceous7%
- Paleocene22%
- Eocene16%
- Oligocene20%
- Miocene30%
- Pliocene4%
- Pleistocene2%
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.
Found in
35 formations
- Fort Union Formation78
- London Clay Formation12
- Bagshot Formation6
- Itahana Formation · Tomioka Group5
- Headon Beds Formation5
- Ravenscrag Formation5
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The named rock units Cornaceae has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 11 further formations hold fewer occurrences each and are not listed. 184 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Cornaceae and its relatives
MioceneWhere Cornaceae and its relatives were recorded in the Miocene.
Found in the same rock
1,568 taxa- Cornophyllum52 sites
- Cornus hyperborea35 sites
- Dicotyledoneae35 sites
- Platanus raynoldsii35 sites
- Populus nebrascensis29 sites
- Dicotylophyllum anomalum27 sites
- Paranymphaea crassifolia26 sites
- Cornus25 sites
- Acer24 sites
- Ampelopsis acerifolia24 sites
- Alnus23 sites
- Ulmus22 sites
- Nyssidium arcticum21 sites
- Quercus21 sites
- Metasequoia occidentalis20 sites
- Glyptostrobus europaeus18 sites
- Salix17 sites
- Betula16 sites
- Cocculus flabella16 sites
- Hicoria antiquora16 sites
- Persites argutus16 sites
- Carya15 sites
- Carpinus14 sites
- Corylites14 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 144 sites for Cornaceae, 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
58 references- Megaflora of the Hell Creek and lower Fort Union Formations in the western Dakotas: Vegetational response to climate change, the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary event, and rapid marine transgression45
- Die Floren des Haselbacher Serie im Weisselster-Becken (Bezirk Leipzig, DDR)42
- Die mittelmiozaenen und obermiozaenen Floren aus der Meuroer und Raunoer Folge in der Lausitz. III. Fundstellen und Palaeobiologie30
- Tretichnye Flory Zapadnoi Sibiri23
- Late Paleocene-early Eocene climate changes in southwestern Wyoming: Paleobotanical analysis18
- Miocene floras in the lower Rhenish basin and their ecological interpretation17
- Die Miozaenan Frucht-und Samen-Floren die Oberpfaelzer Braunkohle. I. Funde aus den sandigen zwischenmitteln14
- Chandler, 196112
- Late Miocene and Pliocene Floras in Central Honshu, Japan10
- Chandler, 196310
- Paleocene flora of the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains10
- Miocenska Flora ze Starych Gliwic na Slasku (Miocene Flora of Stare Gliwice in Upper Silesia)8
Each of the 334 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. 46 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 Cornaceae
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Lapplaender
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 2.0 de
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Cornaceae 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
- Source
- Wikipedia, “Cornaceae”
- 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 itCornales through timeFormations of the MioceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Dumortier 1825