Cibotium
Cibotium, also known as manfern, is a genus of 11 species of tropical tree ferns. It is the only genus in family Cibotiaceae in the Pteridophyte Phylogeny Group classification of 2016. Alternatively, the family may be treated as the subfamily Cibotioideae of a very broadly defined family Cyatheaceae, the family placement used for the genus in Plants of the World Online as of November 2019.

Forest & Kim Starr · CC BY 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- Also called
- manfernPBDB
- Sits inside
- CyatheaceaePBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Streptophyta
Time the record covers
At most 2.6 million years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 2.58 Mya and 0 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
3 occurrences of Cibotium 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
3 occurrences- Pleistocene100%
- 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.
Cibotium and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Cibotium and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
42 taxa- Amaranthaceae3 sites
- Ardisia3 sites
- Carya3 sites
- Chenopodiaceae3 sites
- Cyperaceae3 sites
- Davallia3 sites
- Lepisorus3 sites
- Meliaceae3 sites
- Microlepia3 sites
- Pinus3 sites
- Poaceae3 sites
- Polystichum3 sites
- Pterocarya3 sites
- Salix3 sites
- Angiopteris2 sites
- Asteraceae2 sites
- Athyrium2 sites
- Cheilanthes2 sites
- Impatiens2 sites
- Liliaceae2 sites
- Lygodium2 sites
- Piperaceae2 sites
- Pteridium2 sites
- Pteris stenophylla2 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 3 sites for Cibotium, 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
1 referenceEach of the 3 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 Cibotium
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Forest & Kim Starr
- Licence
- CC BY 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Cibotium was found in MorphoSource and Sketchfab.
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, “Cibotium”
- 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 itCyatheaceae through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Kaulfuss 1820