Pistacia
Pistacia is a genus of flowering plants in the cashew family, Anacardiaceae. It contains 10 to 20 species that are native to Africa and Eurasia from the Canary Islands, all of Africa, and southern Europe, warm and semidesert areas across Asia, and North America from Guatemala to Mexico, as well as southern Texas.

Hans Hillewaert · CC BY-SA 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
- AnacardiaceaePBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Angiospermae
Time the record covers
At least 65 million years on record.
The record covers at least 66 Mya to 129 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 100.5 Mya to 11.7 ka.
15 occurrences of Pistacia 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
15 occurrences- Late Cretaceous13%
- Eocene7%
- Oligocene13%
- Miocene33%
- Pleistocene33%
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
8 formations
- Cretaceous Formation2
- Coatzingo Formation1
- Niveau du gypse d'Aix Formation1
- Bangmai Formation1
- Shanwang Formation1
- Shuanghe Formation1
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The named rock units Pistacia has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 6 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Pistacia and its relatives
MioceneWhere Pistacia and its relatives were recorded in the Miocene.
Found in the same rock
301 taxa- Quercus9 sites
- Alnus5 sites
- Pinus5 sites
- Rhus5 sites
- Acer4 sites
- Chenopodiaceae4 sites
- Plantago4 sites
- Albizia3 sites
- Betula3 sites
- Carpinus3 sites
- Cinnamomum3 sites
- Litsea3 sites
- Albizia miokalkora2 sites
- Anthemis2 sites
- Artemisia2 sites
- Aster2 sites
- Brassicaceae2 sites
- Castanopsis2 sites
- Celtis2 sites
- Cinnamomum scheuchzeri2 sites
- Corylus2 sites
- Cyperaceae2 sites
- Cyperacites2 sites
- Dryophyllum yunnanense2 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 12 sites for Pistacia, 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
10 references- A catalogue of Cenozoic megafossil plants in China3
- Site U13862
- Environmental changes and the origin of agriculture in the Near East2
- Upper Cretaceous floras of the Rocky Mountain region; Flora of the Lance Formation at its type locality, Niobrara County, Wyoming2
- The uppermost Oligocene of Aix-en-Provence (Bouches-du-Rhône, Southern France): A Cenozoic brackish subtropical Konservat Lagerstätte, with fishes, insects and plants1
- Paleoclimatic estimation reveals a weak winter monsoon in southwestern China during the late Miocene: Evidence from plant macrofossils1
- Quantitative reconstruction of the Late Miocene monsoon climates of southwest China: A case study of the Lincang flora from Yunnan Province1
- A diverse assemblage of Anacardiaceae from Oligocene sediments, Tepexi de Rodriguez, Puebla, Mexico1
- La stratigraphie du remplissage de la Grotte du Vallonnet.1
- Miocenska Flora ze Starych Gliwic na Slasku (Miocene Flora of Stare Gliwice in Upper Silesia)1
Each of the 15 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 Pistacia
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Hans Hillewaert
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Pistacia 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
- Source
- Wikipedia, “Pistacia”
- 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 timeFormations of the MioceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Linnaeus 1753