Terminalia
Terminalia is a genus of large trees of the flowering plant family Combretaceae, comprising nearly 300 species distributed in tropical regions of the world. The genus name derives from the Latin word terminus, referring to the fact that the leaves appear at the very tips of the shoots.

Franz Xaver · 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
- CombretaceaePBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Angiospermae
Time the record covers
At least 45 million years on record.
The record covers at least 48.07 Mya to 2.58 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 56 Mya to 1.8 Mya.
35 occurrences of Terminalia 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
35 occurrences- Eocene31%
- Oligocene9%
- Miocene41%
- Pliocene10%
- Pleistocene9%
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
14 formations
- Koobi Fora Formation3
- Lower Formation · Siwalik Group3
- Lower Churia Formation · Siwalik Group3
- McBean Formation · Claiborne Group2
- Ackerman Formation · Wilcox Group2
- John Day Formation1
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The named rock units Terminalia has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 13 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Terminalia and its relatives
MioceneWhere Terminalia and its relatives were recorded in the Miocene.
Found in the same rock
866 taxa- Ficus6 sites
- Acacia5 sites
- Cassia5 sites
- Cynometra palaeoiripa4 sites
- Dipterocarpus siwalicus4 sites
- Lannea4 sites
- Millettia4 sites
- Acer3 sites
- Albizia siwalica3 sites
- Brachystegia sp.3 sites
- Calophyllum3 sites
- Canthium3 sites
- Cathormion sp.3 sites
- Cola lateritia3 sites
- Croton3 sites
- Dalbergia3 sites
- Ficus precunea3 sites
- Hipparion3 sites
- Magnolia3 sites
- Mesua tertiara3 sites
- Metridiochoerus andrewsi3 sites
- Mimosites3 sites
- Murraya khariensis3 sites
- Nectandra lancifolia3 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 30 sites for Terminalia, 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
17 references- Angiospermous fossil leaves from the Siwalik foreland basins and their palaeoclimatic implications7
- A Catalogue of Fossil Plants from India Part 4: Cenozoic (Tertiary) Megafossils5
- The Lower Eocene floras of Southeastern North America4
- Koobi Fora Research Project The Fossil Ungulates: Proboscidea, Perissodactyla, Suidae3
- A Middle Eocene Flora from the Central Sierra Nevada2
- Fossil plants from Bolivia and their bearing upon the age of the uplift of the Eastern Andes2
- The Upper Cretaceous and Eocene floras of South Carolina and Georgia2
- Pliocene Albizia (Fabaceae) from Jharkhand, eastern India: reappraisal of its biogeography during the Cenozoic in Southeast Asia1
- Leaf impressions of Terminalia (Combretaceae) and Daphnogene (Lauraceae) from the Middle Siwalik of the Chatara-Barahakshetra area, eastern Nepal1
- Middle Miocene flora from Siwalik foreland basin of Uttarakhand, India and its phytogeographic and palaeoclimatic implications1
- Quantitative reconstruction of the Late Miocene monsoon climates of southwest China: A case study of the Lincang flora from Yunnan Province1
- A new orang-utan relative from the Late Miocene of Thailand1
Each of the 35 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. 5 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 Terminalia
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Franz Xaver
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 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
- 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 itCombretaceae through timeFormations of the MioceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Linnaeus 1767