Strychnos
Strychnos is a genus of flowering plants, belonging to the family Loganiaceae. The genus includes about 200 accepted species of trees and lianas. The genus is widely distributed around the world's tropics and is noted for the presence of poisonous indole alkaloids in the roots, stems and leaves of various species. Among these alkaloids are the well-known and deadly poisons strychnine and curare.

Franz Eugen Köhler, Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen · 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
- LoganiaceaePBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Angiospermae
Time the record covers
At least 11 million years on record.
The record covers at least 11.63 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 56 Mya to 0 Mya.
9 occurrences of Strychnos 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
9 occurrences- Eocene5%
- Oligocene2%
- Miocene71%
- Pleistocene11%
- Holocene11%
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
4 formations
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The named rock units Strychnos 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.
Strychnos and its relatives
MioceneWhere Strychnos and its relatives were recorded in the Miocene.
Found in the same rock
330 taxa- Celtis4 sites
- Acer3 sites
- Cinnamomum3 sites
- Lithocarpus3 sites
- Magnolia3 sites
- Myrica3 sites
- Nothaphoebe3 sites
- Quercus3 sites
- Smilax3 sites
- Styrax3 sites
- Albizia2 sites
- Albizia miokalkora2 sites
- Alnus2 sites
- Annona2 sites
- Ardisia2 sites
- Berchemia2 sites
- Betula2 sites
- Bumelia2 sites
- Byttneriophyllum tiliaefolium2 sites
- Calocedrus2 sites
- Carpolithus2 sites
- Castaneophyllum patagonicum2 sites
- Castanopsis2 sites
- Castanopsis ceratacantha2 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 7 sites for Strychnos, 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- A catalogue of Cenozoic megafossil plants in China5
- A middle Miocene (12.2 my old) forest in the East African Rift Valley, Keny1
- The Prehistory of Eastern Zambia1
- Tertiary flora from the Rio Pichileufu, Argentina1
- A Miocene flora from Patagonia1
Each of the 9 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 Strychnos
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Franz Eugen Köhler, Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen
- Licence
- Public Domain
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Strychnos 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, “Strychnos”
- 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 itLoganiaceae through timeFormations of the MioceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Linnaeus 1753