Pinus
Pines are a genus of conifers in the family Pinaceae. Pinus is the sole genus in the subfamily Pinoideae. The species are trees or shrubs with their leaves in bunches, usually of 2 to 5 needles. The seeds are carried on woody cones, with two seeds to each cone scale.

Vlad & Marina Butsky on Flickr · CC BY 2.0 · 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
- pinePBDB
- Sits inside
- PinaceaePBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Streptophyta
Time the record covers
At least 205 million years on record.
The record covers at least 205.7 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 237 Mya to 0 Mya.
615 occurrences of Pinus 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
615 occurrences- Late Triassicunder 1%
- Early Jurassicunder 1%
- Middle Jurassicunder 1%
- Late Jurassicunder 1%
- Early Cretaceous1%
- Late Cretaceousunder 1%
- Paleocene1%
- Eocene8%
- Oligocene10%
- Miocene34%
- Pliocene7%
- Pleistocene33%
- Holocene4%
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
76 formations
- Florissant Formation12
- Chloropagus Formation11
- London Clay Formation5
- Sepulcher Formation5
- Green River Formation5
- Salmon City Formation5
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The named rock units Pinus has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 52 further formations hold fewer occurrences each and are not listed. 471 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Pinus and its relatives
MioceneWhere Pinus and its relatives were recorded in the Miocene.
Found in the same rock
3,199 taxa- Quercus123 sites
- Poaceae109 sites
- Alnus96 sites
- Picea92 sites
- Betula81 sites
- Cyperaceae70 sites
- Artemisia66 sites
- Salix65 sites
- Asteraceae61 sites
- Carya61 sites
- Ulmus57 sites
- Acer56 sites
- Ericaceae56 sites
- Chenopodiaceae51 sites
- Juglans51 sites
- Abies49 sites
- Ephedra45 sites
- Apiaceae44 sites
- Corylus44 sites
- Tsuga39 sites
- Carpinus36 sites
- Rosaceae36 sites
- Caryophyllaceae34 sites
- Brassicaceae33 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 346 sites for Pinus, and this reads 240 of them. Of that, one read hit the database's own return limit, so every count below is a floor rather than a total. 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
139 references- Die mittelmiozaenen und obermiozaenen Floren aus der Meuroer und Raunoer Folge in der Lausitz. III. Fundstellen und Palaeobiologie88
- A Catalogue of Fossil Plants from India Part 6: Cenozoic (Quaternary) Palynology and Palaeobotany49
- Site U134441
- Site U134322
- Tretichnye Flory Zapadnoi Sibiri22
- Die oberoligozanen Floren am Nordrand der Sachsischen Lausitz17
- Fossil Plants of the Florissant Beds of Colorado15
- Site U138613
- Niche evolution versus niche conservatism and habitat loss determine persistence and extirpation in late Neogene European Fagaceae11
- Site U138911
- A catalogue of Cenozoic megafossil plants in China11
- Die pliozaenen Floren von Thueringen, Deutsche Demokratische Republik11
Each of the 615 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. 127 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 Pinus
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Vlad & Marina Butsky on Flickr
- Licence
- CC BY 2.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
CT scan
- Source
- MorphoSource
- Licence
- In Copyright
- Commercial use
- cannot be read from the licence given — check the record
- Specimen
- Pinus sp. · hlu:ccc:731incid
The description on this site
- Source
- Wikipedia, “Pine”
- 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 itPinaceae through timeFormations of the MioceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Linnaeus 1753