Nyssa sylvatica
Nyssa sylvatica, commonly known as tupelo, black tupelo, black gum or sour gum, is a medium-sized deciduous tree native to eastern North America from the coastal Northeastern United States and southern Ontario south to central Florida and eastern Texas, as well as Mexico.

Eric Hunt · CC BY-SA 4.0 · 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
- NyssaPBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Angiospermae
Time the record covers
At most 64 million years on record.
The one occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 66 Mya and 2.58 Mya, which is a dating window rather than a span.
1 occurrence of Nyssa sylvatica on record, most of them in the Eocene. 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
1 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
1 formation
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The named rock units Nyssa sylvatica has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed.
Nyssa sylvatica and its relatives
EoceneWhere Nyssa sylvatica and its relatives were recorded in the Eocene.
Found in the same rock
16 taxa- Acer1 site
- Alangium1 site
- Berchemia1 site
- Carex1 site
- Cladrastis1 site
- Glyptostobus pensilis1 site
- Lindera1 site
- Liquidambar1 site
- Paliurus1 site
- Pleioblastus sp.1 site
- Quercus1 site
- Sabia japonica1 site
- Salix1 site
- Sequoia sempervirens1 site
- Vitaceae1 site
- Wisteria1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 1 site for Nyssa sylvatica, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too.
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
1 referenceEach of the 1 occurrence 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 the Paleobiology Database's own record for the work.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Nyssa sylvatica
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Eric Hunt
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Nyssa sylvatica was found in Sketchfab.
Smithsonian Open Access and MorphoSource were 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 itNyssa through timeFormations of the EoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Marshall 1785