Acaena
Acaena is a genus of about 60 species of mainly evergreen, creeping herbaceous perennial plants and subshrubs in the family Rosaceae, native mainly to the Southern Hemisphere, notably New Zealand, Australia and South America, but with a few species extending into the Northern Hemisphere, north to Hawaii and California.

Kurt Stüber [1] · 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
- RosaceaePBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Angiospermae
Time the record covers
At least 35 million years on record.
The record covers at least 37.71 Mya to 2.58 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 48.07 Mya to 774 ka.
8 occurrences of Acaena on record. 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
8 occurrences- Eocene13%
- Oligocene28%
- Miocene9%
- Pleistocene50%
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
2 formations
Loading coastlines…
The named rock units Acaena has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 5 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Found in the same rock
193 taxa- Apiaceae5 sites
- Asteraceae5 sites
- Cyathea5 sites
- Isoetes5 sites
- Nothofagus5 sites
- Acacia4 sites
- Acmena4 sites
- Agathis4 sites
- Araliaceae4 sites
- Araucaria4 sites
- Baculatisporites4 sites
- Banksia4 sites
- Botryococcus4 sites
- Casuarinaceae4 sites
- Chenopodiaceae4 sites
- Corymbia4 sites
- Cunoniaceae4 sites
- Cupressaceae4 sites
- Cyperaceae4 sites
- Dacrycarpus4 sites
- Dacrydium4 sites
- Dicksonia4 sites
- Dodonaea4 sites
- Elaeocarpus4 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 7 sites for Acaena, 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
5 references- Early Pleistocene vegetation change in upland south-eastern Australia4
- Paleofloristic assemblage from the Paleogene Río Guillermo Formation, Argentina: preliminary results of phylogenetic relationships of Nothofagus in South America1
- Palinoflora y ambiente en el Terciario del nordeste de Tierra del Fuego, Argentina1
- A rich Middle Eocene microflora at Arroyo de los Mineros, near Cañadón Beta, NE Tierra del Fuego Province, Argentina1
- Nuevos elementos florísticos del Magellaniano de Patagonia Austral1
Each of the 8 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 Acaena
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Kurt Stüber [1]
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Acaena was found in Sketchfab.
Smithsonian Open Access and MorphoSource were 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, “Acaena”
- 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 timeThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Mutis and Linneaus 1771