Heliotropium
Heliotropium is a genus of flowering plants with around 325 species commonly known as heliotropes. They are highly toxic to dogs and cats, as well as to humans.

Uncredited · Public Domain · 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- Also called
- heliotropePBDB
- Sits inside
- BoraginaceaePBDB
- 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 0 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
7 occurrences of Heliotropium on record, most of them in the Pleistocene. 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
7 occurrences- Pleistocene100%
- Holoceneunder 1%
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
1 formation
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The named rock units Heliotropium has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 6 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Heliotropium and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Heliotropium and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
82 taxa- Cyperaceae7 sites
- Poaceae7 sites
- Chenopodiaceae5 sites
- Artemisia4 sites
- Asteraceae4 sites
- Avicennia3 sites
- Aerva2 sites
- Apiaceae2 sites
- Capparis2 sites
- Cerealia2 sites
- Dodonaea2 sites
- Ephedra2 sites
- Euphorbia2 sites
- Grewia2 sites
- Indigofera2 sites
- Maytenus2 sites
- Oldenlandia2 sites
- Pinus2 sites
- Prosopis2 sites
- Rhizophoraceae2 sites
- Syzygium2 sites
- Tamarix2 sites
- Tribulus2 sites
- Typha angustata2 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 7 sites for Heliotropium, 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
2 references- A Catalogue of Fossil Plants from India Part 6: Cenozoic (Quaternary) Palynology and Palaeobotany6
- Olduvai Gorge; a case study in the interpretation of hominid paleoenvironments in East Africa1
Each of the 7 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. 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 Heliotropium
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- nobody named on the record
- Licence
- Public Domain
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Heliotropium 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
- 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 itBoraginaceae through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Linnaeus 1753