Araucaria
Araucaria is a genus of evergreen coniferous trees in the family Araucariaceae. While today they are largely confined to the Southern Hemisphere, during the Jurassic and Cretaceous they were globally distributed. There are 20 extant species in New Caledonia, eastern Australia, New Guinea, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay.

O.gomez01 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · 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
- AraucariaceaePBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Streptophyta
Time the record covers
At least 174 million years on record.
The record covers at least 174.7 Mya to 129 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 201.4 Mya to 0 Mya.
132 occurrences of Araucaria on record, most of them in the Pleistocene. 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
132 occurrences- Early Jurassic1%
- Middle Jurassic2%
- Late Jurassic7%
- Early Cretaceous10%
- Late Cretaceous15%
- Paleocene3%
- Eocene14%
- Oligocene8%
- Miocene9%
- Pleistocene29%
- Holoceneunder 1%
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
35 formations
- Huitrera Formation9
- Morwell Formation6
- Winton Formation · Rolling Downs Group4
- Kirkwood Formation · Uitenhage Group3
- Jabalpur Formation3
- Morrison Formation3
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The named rock units Araucaria has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 11 further formations hold fewer occurrences each and are not listed. 64 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Araucaria and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Araucaria and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
891 taxa- Podocarpus47 sites
- Eucalyptus44 sites
- Myrtaceae41 sites
- Agathis40 sites
- Proteaceae40 sites
- Cunoniaceae39 sites
- Dacrydium39 sites
- Asteraceae38 sites
- Acacia37 sites
- Chenopodiaceae37 sites
- Dodonaea37 sites
- Monolete37 sites
- Poaceae37 sites
- Rapanea36 sites
- Cyperaceae35 sites
- Elaeocarpus35 sites
- Cyathea32 sites
- Haloragis32 sites
- Plantago32 sites
- Casuarinaceae31 sites
- Leptospermum31 sites
- Macaranga30 sites
- Syzygium30 sites
- Dicksonia28 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 105 sites for Araucaria, 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
45 references- Early Pleistocene vegetation change in upland south-eastern Australia20
- A complete pollen record of the last 230 ka from Lynch's Crater, north-eastern Australia12
- Eocene Plant Diversity at Laguna del Hunco and Río Pichileufú, Patagonia, Argentina9
- The Oligo-Miocene coal floras of southeastern Australia8
- Araucaria (Araucariaceae) species from Australian Tertiary sediments – a micromorphological study7
- Anderson and Anderson, 19857
- A Late Pleistocene and Holocene pollen diagram from Lynch’s Crater, northeastern Queensland, Australia7
- The Upper Cretaceous and Eocene floras of South Carolina and Georgia7
- Jurassic-Lower Cretaceous megaflora in India - a review6
- A Cenomanian Flora from the Winton Formation, Eromanga Basin, Queensland, Australia4
- Paleocene flora of the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains4
- Early Eocene Dispersed Cuticles and Mangrove to Rainforest vegetation at Strahan-Regatta Point, Tasmania3
Each of the 132 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. 33 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 content3
Picture of Araucaria
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- O.gomez01
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
- 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
- Araucaria mirabilis · NfMC:K:5640
3D model
- Source
- Sketchfab
- Licence
- CC Attribution
- Commercial use
- cannot be read from the licence given — check the record
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, “Araucaria”
- 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 itAraucariaceae through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. de Jussieu 1789