Populus
Searched as Populus balsamoides jarmolenkoi. The Paleobiology Database treats Populus as the accepted name.
Populus is a genus of over 60 species of deciduous flowering plants in the family Salicaceae, native to temperate, subarctic, and montane regions of Eurasia, North America, and North Africa, and to the tropical highlands of East Africa. English names variously applied to different species include poplar, aspen, and cottonwood.

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
- poplarPBDB
- Sits inside
- SalicaceaePBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Angiospermae
Time the record covers
At most 10 million years on record.
The one occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 66 Mya and 56 Mya, which is a dating window rather than a span.
1 occurrence of Populus on record, most of them in the Paleocene. 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
1 occurrences- Paleocene100%
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
Loading coastlines…
The named rock units Populus has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed.
Populus and its relatives
PaleoceneWhere Populus and its relatives were recorded in the Paleocene.
Found in the same rock
1,753 taxa- Quercus51 sites
- Alnus45 sites
- Platanus raynoldsii45 sites
- Salix44 sites
- Dicotyledoneae39 sites
- Acer34 sites
- Glyptostrobus europaeus34 sites
- Ulmus32 sites
- Cornophyllum29 sites
- Betula27 sites
- Picea27 sites
- Rhus26 sites
- Cercidiphyllum genetrix23 sites
- Equisetum23 sites
- Pinus23 sites
- Platanus23 sites
- Fraxinus22 sites
- Carpinus21 sites
- Carya21 sites
- Dicotylophyllum anomalum21 sites
- Nyssidium arcticum19 sites
- Poaceae19 sites
- Typha19 sites
- Castanea17 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 172 sites for Populus, 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
1 referenceEach of the 1 occurrence 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. Each entry links to the Paleobiology Database's own record for the work.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Populus
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- nobody named on the record
- Licence
- Public Domain
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Populus 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, “Populus”
- 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 itSalicaceae through timeFormations of the PaleoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Linnaeus 1753