Dioscoreaceae
Dioscoreaceae is a family of monocotyledonous flowering plants, with about 715 known species in nine genera. The best-known member of the family is the yam.

Uncredited · 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
- DioscorealesPBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Angiospermae
Time the record covers
At least 30 million years on record.
The record covers at least 33.9 Mya to 3.6 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 37 Mya to 2.58 Mya.
11 occurrences of Dioscoreaceae 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
11 occurrencesThese 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
3 formations
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The named rock units Dioscoreaceae 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.
Dioscoreaceae and its relatives
MioceneWhere Dioscoreaceae and its relatives were recorded in the Miocene.
Found in the same rock
256 taxa- Dioscorea5 sites
- Poaceae3 sites
- Castanea2 sites
- Celastraceae2 sites
- Cola sp.2 sites
- Commelinaceae2 sites
- Eugenia2 sites
- Ilex2 sites
- Lasiodiscus2 sites
- Lindera2 sites
- Mahonia2 sites
- Myrtaceae2 sites
- Mystroxylon2 sites
- Pollia2 sites
- Rhamnaceae2 sites
- Robinia2 sites
- Rubiaceae2 sites
- Sapium2 sites
- Sapotaceae2 sites
- Sterculiaceae2 sites
- <Fern>1 site
- Abies1 site
- Acalypha1 site
- Acanthaceae1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 10 sites for Dioscoreaceae, 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
8 references- A giant tenrecid from the Miocene of Kenya3
- Dioscoreaceae fossils from the late Oligocene and Miocene Ethiopia2
- Reconstructing Neogene vegetation and climates to infer tectonic uplift in western Yunnan, China1
- Die mittelmiozaenen und obermiozaenen Floren aus der Meuroer und Raunoer Folge in der Lausitz. III. Fundstellen und Palaeobiologie1
- Update on the Megafossil Flora of Florissant, Colorado1
- Studies in Neotropical Paleobotany. V. The Lower Miocene Communities of Panama - The Culebra Formation.1
- A middle Miocene (12.2 my old) forest in the East African Rift Valley, Keny1
- Miocene plants from Colombia, South America1
Each of the 11 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 Dioscoreaceae
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- nobody named on the record
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Dioscoreaceae 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
- 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 itDioscoreales through timeFormations of the MioceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Brown 1810