Pyrus
Pears are a genus of trees, Pyrus, in the family Rosaceae, that bear an edible apple-like fruit of the same name. Several species of pears are cultivated for their fruit and juices, while others are grown as ornamental flowering trees.

Keith Weller · 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
- pearPBDB
- Sits inside
- RosaceaePBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Angiospermae
Time the record covers
At least 69 million years on record.
The record covers at least 72.2 Mya to 2.58 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 89.8 Mya to 11.7 ka.
17 occurrences of Pyrus 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
17 occurrences- Late Cretaceous6%
- Eocene2%
- Oligocene4%
- Miocene58%
- Plioceneunder 1%
- Pleistocene29%
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
3 formations
- Motojuku Formation1
- Ogawa Formation1
- Protection Formation · Nanaimo Group1
Loading coastlines…
The named rock units Pyrus has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 14 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Pyrus and its relatives
MioceneWhere Pyrus and its relatives were recorded in the Miocene.
Found in the same rock
288 taxa- Alnus6 sites
- Corylus6 sites
- Populus6 sites
- Quercus6 sites
- Acer5 sites
- Aesculus5 sites
- Betula5 sites
- Carpinus5 sites
- Salix5 sites
- Ulmus5 sites
- Fraxinus4 sites
- Picea4 sites
- Rhus4 sites
- Typha4 sites
- Viburnum4 sites
- Abies3 sites
- Alnus nepalensis3 sites
- Apiaceae3 sites
- Betula utilis3 sites
- Cornus3 sites
- Cyperaceae3 sites
- Desmodium3 sites
- Engelhardia3 sites
- Ephedra3 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 8 sites for Pyrus, 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
6 references- Die mittelmiozaenen und obermiozaenen Floren aus der Meuroer und Raunoer Folge in der Lausitz. III. Fundstellen und Palaeobiologie5
- A Catalogue of Indian Fossil Plants5
- Die Miozaenan Frucht-und Samen-Floren die Oberpfaelzer Braunkohle. I. Funde aus den sandigen zwischenmitteln3
- Late Miocene and Pliocene Floras in Central Honshu, Japan2
- The Rujada Flora of west central Oregon1
- Flora of the Upper Cretaceous Nanaimo Group of Vancouver Island, British Columbia1
Each of the 17 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 Pyrus
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Keith Weller
- Licence
- Public Domain
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Pyrus 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, “Pear”
- 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 itRosaceae through timeFormations of the MioceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Linnaeus 1753