Asimina

Asimina is a genus of small trees or shrubs described as a genus in 1763. Asimina is the only temperate genus in the tropical and subtropical flowering plant family Annonaceae. Asimina have large, simple leaves and large fruit. It is native to eastern North America and collectively referred to as pawpaw. Asimina includes the widespread common pawpaw A. triloba, which bears the largest edible fruit indigenous to the United States. Pawpaws are native to 26 states of the U.S. and to Ontario in Canada. The common pawpaw is a patch-forming (clonal) understory tree found in well-drained, deep, fertile bottomland and hilly upland habitat. Pawpaws are in the same plant family (Annonaceae) as the custard apple, cherimoya, sweetsop, soursop, and ylang-ylang; the genus is the only member of that family not confined to the tropics. Fossils date to the Cretaceous.

Asimina

Scott Bauer, USDA · 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
pawpawPBDB
Sits inside
AnnonaceaePBDB
Diet
"photoautotroph"PBDB, for Angiospermae

Time the record covers

At least 54 million years on record.

The record covers at least 66 Mya to 11.63 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 72.2 Mya to 3.6 Mya.

Late Cretaceous — about 1 of 9 occurrencesLate CretaceousPaleocene — about 0 of 9 occurrencesEocene — about 3 of 9 occurrencesEoceneOligocene — about 0 of 9 occurrencesMiocene — about 5 of 9 occurrencesMiocenePliocene — about 0 of 9 occurrencesPleistocene — about 0 of 9 occurrences74–71 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences71–69 Mya — about 0.4 occurrences69–66 Mya — about 0.4 occurrences66–64 Mya — about 0.1 occurrences57–55 Mya — about 0.3 occurrences55–52 Mya — about 0.5 occurrences52–50 Mya — about 0.5 occurrences50–47 Mya — about 0.4 occurrences47–45 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences45–43 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences43–40 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences40–38 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences38–36 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences36–33 Mya — about 0.1 occurrences12–9.4 Mya — about 2 occurrences9.4–7.0 Mya — about 2 occurrences7.0–4.6 Mya — about 1 occurrence4.6–2.2 Mya — about 0.1 occurrences66 Mya11.63 Mya74 Mya2 Mya

9 occurrences of Asimina on record, most of them in the Miocene. 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

9 occurrences

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

4 formations

Wasatch — 39.53°N, 107.78°WFox Hills — 46.53°N, 100.47°WMidway — 29.26°N, 98.49°WAckerman — 34.66°N, 89.10°W

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The named rock units Asimina 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.

Asimina and its relatives

Miocene

Where Asimina and its relatives were recorded in the Miocene.

Found in the same rock

52 taxa

The Paleobiology Database records 3 sites for Asimina, 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

Each of the 9 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 Asimina

Credit
Scott Bauer, USDA
Licence
Public Domain
Commercial use
the licence allows it

No 3D scan of Asimina 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

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 itAnnonaceae through timeFormations of the MioceneThe world it lived on

Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Adanson 1763