Bauhinia
Bauhinia is a large genus of flowering plants in the subfamily Cercidoideae and tribe Bauhinieae, in the large flowering plant family Fabaceae, with a pantropical distribution. The genus was named after the Bauhin brothers Gaspard and Johann, Swiss-French botanists.

Tatiana Gerus from Brisbane, Australia · CC BY 2.0 · 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
- FabaceaePBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Angiospermae
Time the record covers
At least 92 million years on record.
The record covers at least 93.9 Mya to 1.8 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 100.5 Mya to 0 Mya.
38 occurrences of Bauhinia 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
38 occurrences- Late Cretaceous26%
- Paleocene18%
- Eocene5%
- Miocene34%
- Pliocene5%
- Pleistocene10%
- 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
15 formations
- Fort Union Formation6
- Tuscaloosa Formation5
- Nkondo Formation · Albertine Group2
- Dunvegan Formation2
- Lower Formation · Siwalik Group2
- Eutaw Formation2
Loading coastlines…
The named rock units Bauhinia has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 10 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Bauhinia and its relatives
MioceneWhere Bauhinia and its relatives were recorded in the Miocene.
Found in the same rock
614 taxa- Ampelopsis acerifolia6 sites
- Corylites5 sites
- Hicoria antiquora5 sites
- Lauraceae5 sites
- Malvales5 sites
- Metasequoia occidentalis5 sites
- Andromeda parlatorii4 sites
- Cornus hyperborea4 sites
- Dicotyledoneae4 sites
- Diospyros primaeva4 sites
- Ficus krausiana4 sites
- Menispermites4 sites
- Palaeocarpinus4 sites
- Acacia3 sites
- Beringiaphyllum cupanioides3 sites
- Celtis aspera3 sites
- Cercidiphyllum3 sites
- Cinnamomum newberryi3 sites
- Combretum3 sites
- Cordia apiculata3 sites
- Ficus daphnogenoides3 sites
- Ficus woolsoni3 sites
- Joffrea <BB20>3 sites
- Laurus plutonia3 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 31 sites for Bauhinia, 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
21 references- Upper Cretaceous floras of the eastern Gulf region in Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia7
- Late Paleocene-early Eocene climate changes in southwestern Wyoming: Paleobotanical analysis5
- A Catalogue of Fossil Plants from India Part 4: Cenozoic (Tertiary) Megafossils3
- Middle Miocene flora from Siwalik foreland basin of Uttarakhand, India and its phytogeographic and palaeoclimatic implications2
- Angiospermous fossil leaves from the Siwalik foreland basins and their palaeoclimatic implications2
- A catalogue of Cenozoic megafossil plants in China2
- A Catalogue of Fossil Plants from India Part 6: Cenozoic (Quaternary) Palynology and Palaeobotany2
- Upper Cretaceous floras of the Dunvegan, Bad Heart, and Milk River Formations of Western Canada2
- Systematic descriptions, in First occurrence of Cedrelospermum (Ulmaceae) in Asia and its biogeographic implications1
- Systematic descriptions, in New biogeographic insight into Bauhinia s.l. (Leguminosae): integration from fossil records and molecular analyses1
- Middle to late Miocene environments of southern Ecuador: temperature, elevation and fossil plants of the Nabon Basin.1
- Palaeovegetation (fossil plants) of the Albertine rift valley1
Each of the 38 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. 9 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 Bauhinia
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Tatiana Gerus from Brisbane, Australia
- Licence
- CC BY 2.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan was found. Smithsonian Open Access, MorphoSource and Sketchfab were all searched.
The description on this site
- Source
- Wikipedia, “Bauhinia”
- 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 itFabaceae through timeFormations of the MioceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Linnaeus 1753