How are dates stored in Oracle?

Question

How are dates stored in Oracle? For example I know most systems use Epoch time to determine what time it is. By calculating how many seconds away from January 1st 1970. Does

Answer 1

From the manual at http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/server.112/e26088/sql_elements001.htm#sthref151

For each DATE value, Oracle stores the following information: year, month, day, hour, minute, and second

So apparently it's not storing an epoch value which is also confirmed by this chapter of the manual:

The database stores dates internally as numbers. Dates are stored in fixed-length fields of 7 bytes each, corresponding to century, year, month, day, hour, minute, and second