Metopium
Metopium or poisonwood is a genus of flowering plants in the sumac family, Anacardiaceae. They are dioecious trees with poisonous sap that can induce contact dermatitis.

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
- poisonwoodPBDB
- Sits inside
- AnacardiaceaePBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Angiospermae
Time the record covers
At least 10 million years on record.
The record covers at least 33.9 Mya to 23.04 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 56 Mya to 5.333 Mya.
3 occurrences of Metopium on record. 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
3 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 the same rock
127 taxa- Caesalpinites2 sites
- Cassia2 sites
- Abies1 site
- Abies concoloroides1 site
- Acer1 site
- Acer glabroides1 site
- Alnus1 site
- Amelanchier1 site
- Antholithus1 site
- Apocynophyllum tabellarum1 site
- Arecaceae1 site
- Asplenium eolignitica1 site
- Astronium1 site
- Athyana1 site
- Berberis1 site
- Berchemia1 site
- Bignonia1 site
- Bumelia1 site
- Caesalpinia1 site
- Calophyllum1 site
- Canna eocenica1 site
- Capparis1 site
- Carpites polygonoides1 site
- Carya1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 3 sites for Metopium, 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
3 references- Fossil Plants of the Tertiary Beaverhead Basins in Southwestern Montana1
- A Miocene flora from the gorge of the Yumuri River, Matanzas, Cuba1
- The Lower Eocene floras of Southeastern North America1
Each 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. 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 Metopium
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Forest & Kim Starr
- Licence
- CC BY 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Metopium 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, “Metopium”
- 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 itAnacardiaceae through timeThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Browne 1758