Meliosma
Meliosma is a genus of flowering plants in the family Sabiaceae, native to tropical to warm temperate regions of southern and eastern Asia and the Americas. It is traditionally considered to contain about 100 species; some botanists take a much more conservative view accepting only 20-25 species as distinct. They are trees or shrubs, growing to 10–45 m tall.

No machine-readable author provided. MPF assumed (based on copyright claims). · 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
- SabiaceaePBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Angiospermae
Time the record covers
At least 57 million years on record.
The record covers at least 57.5 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 60.9 Mya to 0 Mya.
85 occurrences of Meliosma on record, most of them in the Eocene. 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
85 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
19 formations
- Golden Valley Formation10
- Willwood Formation8
- London Clay Formation8
- Fort Union Formation3
- Wasatch Formation3
- Motojuku Formation2
Loading coastlines…
The named rock units Meliosma has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 36 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Meliosma and its relatives
EoceneWhere Meliosma and its relatives were recorded in the Eocene.
Found in the same rock
635 taxa- Glyptostrobus europaeus14 sites
- Alnus13 sites
- Cercidiphyllum genetrix12 sites
- Metasequoia occidentalis12 sites
- Acer10 sites
- Averrhoites affinis9 sites
- Dicotyledoneae9 sites
- Quercus9 sites
- Magnolia8 sites
- Populus8 sites
- Ampelopsis acerifolia7 sites
- Cinnamomum7 sites
- Menispermites parvareolatus7 sites
- Myrica7 sites
- Platanus raynoldsii7 sites
- Rhus7 sites
- Tilia7 sites
- Vitis7 sites
- Zingiberopsis isonervosa7 sites
- Betula6 sites
- Equisetum6 sites
- Hamamelidaceae6 sites
- Lindera6 sites
- Nyssa6 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 43 sites for Meliosma, 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
26 references- Plant and mammal diversity in the Paleocene to Early Eocene of the Bighorn Basin11
- Stratigraphy and paleobotany of the Golden Valley Formation (Early Tertiary) of western North Dakota10
- A catalogue of Cenozoic megafossil plants in China8
- Tretichnye Flory Zapadnoi Sibiri8
- Die Miozaenan Frucht-und Samen-Floren die Oberpfaelzer Braunkohle. I. Funde aus den sandigen zwischenmitteln6
- Chandler, 19616
- Die mittelmiozaenen und obermiozaenen Floren aus der Meuroer und Raunoer Folge in der Lausitz. III. Fundstellen und Palaeobiologie5
- Fruits and seeds of the Middle Eocene Nut Beds Flora, Clarno Formation, Oregon5
- Late Paleocene-early Eocene climate changes in southwestern Wyoming: Paleobotanical analysis3
- Late Miocene and Pliocene Floras in Central Honshu, Japan3
- Die "Saugbaggerflora", eine Frucht- und Samenflora aus dem Grenzbereich Miozaen- Pliozaen von Sessenheim im Elsass (Frankreich)2
- Miocene floras in the lower Rhenish basin and their ecological interpretation2
Each of the 85 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. 14 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 content2
Picture of Meliosma
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- No machine-readable author provided. MPF assumed (based on copyright claims).
- Licence
- CC BY 2.5
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
CT scan
- Source
- MorphoSource
- Licence
- not stated by the source
- Commercial use
- cannot be read from the licence given — check the record
- Specimen
- Meliosma berryi · usnm:paleobiology:pal722043
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, “Meliosma”
- 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 itSabiaceae through timeFormations of the EoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Blume 1823