Fraxinus
Fraxinus, commonly called ash, is a genus of plants in the olive and lilac family, Oleaceae, and comprises 45–65 species of usually medium-to-large trees, most of which are deciduous, although some subtropical species are evergreen. The genus is widespread throughout much of Europe, Asia, and North America.

Franz Eugen Köhler, Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen · 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
- ashPBDB
- Sits inside
- OleaceaePBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Angiospermae
Time the record covers
At least 65 million years on record.
The record covers at least 66 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 100.5 Mya to 0 Mya.
91 occurrences of Fraxinus 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
91 occurrences- Late Cretaceous7%
- Paleocene14%
- Eocene9%
- Oligocene6%
- Miocene32%
- Pliocene2%
- Pleistocene22%
- Holocene8%
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
34 formations
- Fort Union Formation8
- Lance Formation4
- Itahana Formation · Tomioka Group3
- Middlegate Formation3
- Buffalo Canyon Formation2
- Aldrich Station Formation2
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The named rock units Fraxinus has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 10 further formations hold fewer occurrences each and are not listed. 39 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Fraxinus and its relatives
MioceneWhere Fraxinus and its relatives were recorded in the Miocene.
Found in the same rock
1,053 taxa- Quercus40 sites
- Alnus34 sites
- Salix31 sites
- Betula30 sites
- Ulmus30 sites
- Poaceae25 sites
- Acer24 sites
- Cyperaceae22 sites
- Carpinus20 sites
- Carya20 sites
- Picea20 sites
- Abies19 sites
- Juglans19 sites
- Artemisia18 sites
- Corylus17 sites
- Pinus17 sites
- Populus17 sites
- Asteraceae15 sites
- Potamogeton15 sites
- Typha15 sites
- Viburnum15 sites
- Celtis13 sites
- Ilex13 sites
- Ostrya13 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 70 sites for Fraxinus, 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
38 references- A Catalogue of Fossil Plants from India Part 6: Cenozoic (Quaternary) Palynology and Palaeobotany10
- Paleocene flora of the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains10
- Late Miocene and Pliocene Floras in Central Honshu, Japan7
- Upper Cretaceous floras of the Rocky Mountain region; Flora of the Lance Formation at its type locality, Niobrara County, Wyoming5
- Die mittelmiozaenen und obermiozaenen Floren aus der Meuroer und Raunoer Folge in der Lausitz. III. Fundstellen und Palaeobiologie4
- A catalogue of Cenozoic megafossil plants in China4
- Plant and mammal diversity in the Paleocene to Early Eocene of the Bighorn Basin4
- Paleoecological and Floristic Heterogeneity in the Plant-Fossil Record - An Analysis Based on the Eocene of Washington3
- Recent discoveries of fossil vertebrates in the lower peninsula of Michigan3
- Miocene Floras From the Middlegate Basin, West-Central Nevada3
- Fossil Plants of the Tertiary Beaverhead Basins in Southwestern Montana3
- Mio-Pliocene floras from west-central Nevada3
Each of the 91 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. 26 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 content2
Picture of Fraxinus
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Franz Eugen Köhler, Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen
- Licence
- Public Domain
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
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, “Fraxinus”
- 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 itOleaceae through timeFormations of the MioceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Linnaeus 1753