Nectandra
Nectandra is a genus of flowering plants in the family Lauraceae. They are primarily Neotropical, ranging from northern Mexico through Central America, the Caribbean, and tropical South America to northern Argentina. They have fruit with various medical effects. Sweetwood is a common name for some plants in this genus.

Jorge Vallmitjana · 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- Sits inside
- LauraceaePBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Angiospermae
Time the record covers
At least 45 million years on record.
The record covers at least 48.07 Mya to 2.58 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 66 Mya to 0 Mya.
27 occurrences of Nectandra 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
27 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
6 formations
- Ligorio Márquez Formation3
- Iguincha Formation · Nabon Group1
- Rockdale Formation · Wilcox Group1
- Palo Pintado Formation1
- Nanlin Formation1
- Ackerman Formation · Wilcox Group1
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The named rock units Nectandra has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 19 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Nectandra and its relatives
MioceneWhere Nectandra and its relatives were recorded in the Miocene.
Found in the same rock
291 taxa- Annona7 sites
- Cassia6 sites
- Ficus5 sites
- Inga5 sites
- Persea5 sites
- Phyllites5 sites
- Cedrela4 sites
- Maytenus4 sites
- Tapirira4 sites
- Terminalia4 sites
- Carpolithus3 sites
- Combretum3 sites
- Dryophyllum3 sites
- Eugenia3 sites
- Fagara3 sites
- Goeppertia3 sites
- Heliconia3 sites
- Leguminosites3 sites
- Mimusops3 sites
- Myrcia3 sites
- Oreodaphne obtusifolia3 sites
- Palmophyllum3 sites
- Quercus3 sites
- Sapindus3 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 16 sites for Nectandra, 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
16 references- Paleoflora de la Formación Ligorio Márquez (XI Región, Chile) en su localidad tipo: sistemática, edad e implicancias paleoclimáticas3
- The Tertiary flora of the island of Trinidad, B. W. I.3
- The Lower Eocene floras of Southeastern North America3
- Tertiary flora from the Rio Pichileufu, Argentina2
- Tertiary plants from Venezuela2
- Miocene plants from Southern Mexico2
- Tertiary fossil plants from Costa Rica2
- Étude sur les florès tertiaires de quelques gisements de lignite de l'Indochine et du Yunnan [Study on the Tertiary flora of some lignite deposits in Indochina and Yunnan]2
- Middle to late Miocene environments of southern Ecuador: temperature, elevation and fossil plants of the Nabon Basin.1
- Hojas de Angiospermas de la Formación Palo Pintado, Mioceno Superior, Salta, Argentina, Parte I: Anacardiaceae, Lauraceae y Moraceae1
- A catalogue of Cenozoic megafossil plants in China1
- A new paratropical angiosperm florule in the Eocene Rockdale Formation of Bastrop County, Texas1
Each of the 27 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. 4 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 content1
Picture of Nectandra
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Jorge Vallmitjana
- Licence
- Public Domain
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Nectandra 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, “Nectandra”
- 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 itLauraceae through timeFormations of the MioceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Bergius 1767