Machaerina
Machaerina (twigrush) is a genus of flowering plants in the sedge family. Its species occur in tropical America, the West Indies, Malesia, Australia and the Pacific region. The name comes from the Greek machaira, alluding to the shape of the leaves in the type species – Machaerina restioides.

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- Sits inside
- CyperaceaePBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Angiospermae
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.
17 occurrences of Machaerina 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
17 occurrences- Pleistocene90%
- Holocene10%
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.
Machaerina and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Machaerina and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
205 taxa- Cyperaceae17 sites
- Eucalyptus17 sites
- Macaranga17 sites
- Mallotus17 sites
- Monolete17 sites
- Poaceae17 sites
- Podocarpus17 sites
- Rapanea17 sites
- Rutaceae17 sites
- Sapindaceae17 sites
- Trema17 sites
- Urticaceae17 sites
- Asteraceae16 sites
- Celtis16 sites
- Chenopodiaceae16 sites
- Elaeocarpus16 sites
- Hydrocotyle16 sites
- Acacia15 sites
- Argyrodendron15 sites
- Dacrydium15 sites
- Dodonaea15 sites
- Eleocharis15 sites
- Agathis14 sites
- Araucaria14 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 17 sites for Machaerina, 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 references- A complete pollen record of the last 230 ka from Lynch's Crater, north-eastern Australia9
- A Late Pleistocene and Holocene pollen diagram from Lynch’s Crater, northeastern Queensland, Australia8
Each of the 17 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 doi.org. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Machaerina
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Forest & Kim Starr
- Licence
- CC BY 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Machaerina 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, “Machaerina”
- 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 itCyperaceae through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Vahl 1805