Sapotaceae
The Sapotaceae are a family of flowering plants belonging to the order Ericales. The family includes approximately 800 species of evergreen trees and shrubs in about 65 genera. Their distribution is pantropical.

Uncredited · CC BY-SA 3.0 · 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
- EricalesPBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Angiospermae
Time the record covers
At least 72 million years on record.
The record covers at least 72.2 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 100.5 Mya to 0 Mya.
205 occurrences of Sapotaceae 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
205 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
25 formations
- Yaw Formation77
- Cerrejón Formation6
- Okinoyama Formation · Ube Group5
- Gatun Formation4
- Ackerman Formation · Wilcox Group3
- Tuscaloosa Formation3
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The named rock units Sapotaceae has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. One further formation holds fewer occurrences and is not listed. 79 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Sapotaceae and its relatives
EoceneWhere Sapotaceae and its relatives were recorded in the Eocene.
Found in the same rock
1,681 taxa- Sapotaceoidaepollenites53 sites
- Laevigatosporites52 sites
- Cupanieidites48 sites
- Verrucatosporites43 sites
- Euphorbiaceae42 sites
- Deltoidospora39 sites
- Acrostichum38 sites
- Verrucatosporites usmensis35 sites
- Longapertites34 sites
- Rubiaceae34 sites
- Cupuliferoipollenites32 sites
- Discoidites31 sites
- Poaceae31 sites
- Proxapertites operculatus31 sites
- Dicolpopollis29 sites
- Campnosperma28 sites
- Palaquium28 sites
- Saxosporis28 sites
- Casuarinidites cainozoicus27 sites
- Podocarpus27 sites
- Sapindaceae27 sites
- Arecaceae26 sites
- Fabaceae26 sites
- Asteraceae25 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 145 sites for Sapotaceae, and this reads all of them. Of that, one read hit the database's own return limit, so every count below is a floor rather than a total. 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
48 references- A proto-monsoonal climate in the late Eocene of Southeast Asia: evidence from a sedimentary record in central Myanmar77
- Middle Miocene palaeotopography at Little Bay, near Maroubra, New South Wales19
- A complete pollen record of the last 230 ka from Lynch's Crater, north-eastern Australia12
- Niche evolution versus niche conservatism and habitat loss determine persistence and extirpation in late Neogene European Fagaceae8
- Late Paleocene fossils from the Cerrejón Formation, Colombia, are the earliest record of Neotropical rainforest6
- The Eocene flora of the Ube coal-field, southwest Honshu, Japan5
- Studies in Neotropical Paleobotany. X. The Pliocene communities of Panama - Composistion, numerical representations, and paleocommunity paleoenvironmental reconstructions.4
- Stratigraphic, Paleoclimatic, and Paleobiogeographic Significance of Tertiary Sporomorphs from Massachusetts4
- A Late Pleistocene and Holocene pollen diagram from Lynch’s Crater, northeastern Queensland, Australia4
- The Tertiary flora of the island of Trinidad, B. W. I.4
- The Oligo-Miocene coal floras of southeastern Australia3
- A Catalogue of Indian Fossil Plants3
Each of the 205 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. 36 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 Sapotaceae
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- nobody named on the record
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Sapotaceae 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, “Sapotaceae”
- 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 itEricales through timeFormations of the EoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. de Jussieu 1789