Psidium
Psidium is a genus of trees and shrubs in the family Myrtaceae. It is native to warmer parts of the Western Hemisphere. Many of the species bear edible fruits, and for this reason several are cultivated commercially. The most popularly cultivated species is the common guava, Psidium guajava.

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
- guavaPBDB
- Sits inside
- MyrtaceaePBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Angiospermae
Time the record covers
At least 50 million years on record.
The record covers at least 56 Mya to 5.333 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 57.5 Mya to 2.58 Mya.
5 occurrences of Psidium on record, most of them in the Miocene. 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
5 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
2 formations
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The named rock units Psidium has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 3 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Psidium and its relatives
MioceneWhere Psidium and its relatives were recorded in the Miocene.
Found in the same rock
204 taxa- Cassia3 sites
- Anacardites2 sites
- Annona2 sites
- Bumelia2 sites
- Dalbergia2 sites
- Ficus2 sites
- Inga2 sites
- Myrcia2 sites
- Phyllites2 sites
- Acmopyle engelhardti1 site
- Acrodiclidium oligocaenicum1 site
- Adenocalymma tertiaria n. sp.1 site
- Albizia mahuadanrensis1 site
- Albizia palaeoprocera1 site
- Allamanda crassostipitata1 site
- Allophyllus eduliformis1 site
- Allophyllus graciliformis1 site
- Ampelodaphne grandifolia1 site
- Anacardites pichileufensis1 site
- Angiospermeae <6- to 7- loculed fibrous fruit>1 site
- Angiospermeae <Asymmetric ellipsoidal seed>1 site
- Angiospermeae <Clavate structure>1 site
- Angiospermeae <Elliptical biwinged fruit>1 site
- Angiospermeae <Elongate infructescence>1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 5 sites for Psidium, 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
5 references- Pliocene Albizia (Fabaceae) from Jharkhand, eastern India: reappraisal of its biogeography during the Cenozoic in Southeast Asia1
- A Preliminary Survey of Fossil Leaves and Well-Preserved Reproductive Structures from the Sentinel Butte Formation (Paleocene) near Almont, North Dakota1
- Tertiary flora from the Rio Pichileufu, Argentina1
- A flora from the Forest Clay of Trinidad, B. W. I1
- A Late Tertiary flora from Bahia, Brazil1
Each of the 5 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 content2
Picture of Psidium
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Forest & Kim Starr
- Licence
- CC BY 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
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, “Psidium”
- 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 itMyrtaceae through timeFormations of the MioceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Linnaeus 1753