The open plant encyclopedia
Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.
The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.
Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.
Athrotaxites is an extinct genus of conifers belonging to the family Cupressaceae, known primarily from fossil material dating to the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. It is closely related to the extant Tasmanian genus Athrotaxis, and is typically classified within the subfamily Athrotaxoideae.
Fossils attributed to Athrotaxites have been recovered from a range of geographically and geologically diverse sites, indicating that the genus once had a broad distribution across the Northern Hemisphere during the Cretaceous period. In North America, well-preserved remains of Athrotaxites berryi have been described from the Aptian-aged Kootenai Formation in Montana and the Lower Blairmore Formation in Alberta, Canada, representing some of the earliest records of the genus on the continent. Additional fossil material, including ovuliferous complexes assigned to another Athrotaxites species, has been found in the Upper Cretaceous Raritan Formation of New Jersey, USA. In Asia, Athrotaxites yumenensis was discovered in the Lower Cretaceous Zhonggou Formation in northwestern China, where it occurs abundantly in certain sedimentary layers. Jurassic aged fossils been found in India, Germany, Madagascar and Argentina. A Jurassic aged fossil is known from the Morrison Formation in Montana.
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Athrotaxites by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts are shared under the same licence.
