Fagaceae
The Fagaceae are a family of flowering plants that includes beeches, chestnuts and oaks, and comprises eight genera with around 1,000 or more species. Fagaceae in temperate regions are mostly deciduous, whereas in the tropics, many species occur as evergreen trees and shrubs. They are characterized by alternate simple leaves with pinnate venation, unisexual flowers in the form of catkins, and fruit in the form of cup-like (cupule) nuts. Their leaves are often lobed, and both petioles and stipules are generally present. Their fruits lack endosperm and lie in a scaly or spiny husk that may or may not enclose the entire nut, which may consist of one to seven seeds. In the oaks, genus Quercus, the fruit is a non-valved nut called an acorn. The husk of the acorn in most oaks only forms a cup in which the nut sits. Other members of the family have fully enclosed nuts.

Fagus_sylvatica_020.jpg : Willow derivative work: Bff ( talk ) · CC BY 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
- FagalesPBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Angiospermae
Time the record covers
At least 100 million years on record.
The record covers at least 100.5 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 143.1 Mya to 0 Mya.
1,214 occurrences of Fagaceae 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
1,214 occurrences- Early Cretaceousunder 1%
- Late Cretaceous3%
- Paleocene8%
- Eocene19%
- Oligocene8%
- Miocene35%
- Pliocene10%
- Pleistocene16%
- Holocene2%
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
141 formations
- Fort Union Formation71
- Yaw Formation46
- John Day Formation24
- Sanying Formation24
- Xiaolongtan Formation22
- Florissant Formation20
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The named rock units Fagaceae has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 117 further formations hold fewer occurrences each and are not listed. 548 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Fagaceae and its relatives
MioceneWhere Fagaceae and its relatives were recorded in the Miocene.
Found in the same rock
2,629 taxa- Quercus95 sites
- Pinus53 sites
- Acer51 sites
- Alnus50 sites
- Carya47 sites
- Salix46 sites
- Picea39 sites
- Ulmus39 sites
- Betula36 sites
- Fagus35 sites
- Liquidambar34 sites
- Taxodium33 sites
- Poaceae32 sites
- Pediastrum28 sites
- Caryapollenites26 sites
- Coniferales26 sites
- Fraxinus26 sites
- Castanea25 sites
- Cicatricosisporites dorogensis25 sites
- Cupuliferoipollenites25 sites
- Laevigatosporites25 sites
- Momipites25 sites
- Populus25 sites
- Pterocarya25 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 525 sites for Fagaceae, and this reads 240 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
165 references- A catalogue of Cenozoic megafossil plants in China106
- Die mittelmiozaenen und obermiozaenen Floren aus der Meuroer und Raunoer Folge in der Lausitz. III. Fundstellen und Palaeobiologie79
- Late Miocene and Pliocene Floras in Central Honshu, Japan64
- Palynological data from the Fort Union and Wasatch formations, Powder River basin, Wyoming and Montana57
- A proto-monsoonal climate in the late Eocene of Southeast Asia: evidence from a sedimentary record in central Myanmar46
- Paleocene flora of the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains34
- Fossil Plants of the Florissant Beds of Colorado31
- A Catalogue of Fossil Plants from India Part 6: Cenozoic (Quaternary) Palynology and Palaeobotany28
- A Middle Eocene Flora from the Central Sierra Nevada25
- Distribution of pollen and spores in a subsurface marine Wilcox (Paleocene-Eocene) section in southwest Louisiana24
- Niche evolution versus niche conservatism and habitat loss determine persistence and extirpation in late Neogene European Fagaceae23
- Site U138922
Each of the 1,214 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. 153 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 Fagaceae
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Fagus_sylvatica_020.jpg : Willow derivative work: Bff ( talk )
- Licence
- CC BY 2.5
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Fagaceae 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, “Fagaceae”
- 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 itFagales through timeFormations of the MioceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Dumortier 1829