Description

Quercus gambelli Nutt

Pliocene

Rita Blanca Formation

Oldham County, TX USA.

Beautiful, delicate 52mm western scrub oak leaf on 160mm slab.

Plant.

Quercus is the genus for oak trees living and extinct.  Q. gambelli goes by many local names in the “Four Corners states” (Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico) and surrounding areas where it is native.  It’s called the scrub oak, white oak, and Gambel oak among others.

The earliest confidently-identified Quercus fossils are pollen from the Late Paleocene of Austria.  By the Middle Eocene it had spread to North America, Europe, and Asia.  Oaks originated in tropical forests but they continued to thrive while other trees retreated to lower latitudes as climates became cooler and drier across the Oligocene and Miocene.