Cercocarpus
Searched as Cercocarpus nevadensis. The Paleobiology Database treats Cercocarpus as the accepted name.
Cercocarpus, commonly known as mountain mahogany, is a small genus of at least nine species of nitrogen-fixing flowering plants in the rose family, Rosaceae. They are native to the western United States and northern Mexico, where they grow in chaparral and semidesert habitats and climates, often at high altitudes. Several are found in the California chaparral and woodlands ecoregion.

Stan Shebs · 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 most 18 million years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 23.04 Mya and 5.333 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
8 occurrences of Cercocarpus 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
8 occurrences- Miocene100%
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 Cercocarpus has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed.
Cercocarpus and its relatives
MioceneWhere Cercocarpus and its relatives were recorded in the Miocene.
Found in the same rock
340 taxa- Quercus12 sites
- Mahonia11 sites
- Typha lesquereuxi11 sites
- Pinus florissanti9 sites
- Chamaecyparis8 sites
- Salix8 sites
- Carya7 sites
- Cedrela7 sites
- Crataegus7 sites
- Picea7 sites
- Sequoia affinis7 sites
- Cercis parvifolia6 sites
- Fagopsis longifolia6 sites
- Fraxinus6 sites
- Koelreuteria6 sites
- Pinus6 sites
- Rhus6 sites
- Robinia6 sites
- Abies concoloroides5 sites
- Acer florissanti5 sites
- Astronium5 sites
- Athyana5 sites
- Bursera5 sites
- Cardiospermum5 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 13 sites for Cercocarpus, 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
2 referencesEach 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. Each entry links to the Paleobiology Database's own record for the work.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Cercocarpus
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Stan Shebs
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Cercocarpus 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, “Cercocarpus”
- 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 timeFormations of the MioceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Humboldt et al. 1823