Arenaria interpres
The ruddy turnstone is a small cosmopolitan wading bird, one of two species of turnstone in the genus Arenaria.

Chuck Homler d/b/a Focus On Wildlife · CC BY-SA 4.0 · 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- Also called
- ruddy turnstonePBDB
- Sits inside
- ArenariaPBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB, for Coelurosauria
- Life habit
- ground dwelling, solitaryPBDB, for Theropoda
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
- Environment
- marinePBDB, for Charadriiformes
Time the record covers
At most 129 thousand years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 129 ka and 0 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
10 occurrences of Arenaria interpres on record, most of them in the Pleistocene. 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
10 occurrences- Pleistocene59%
- Holocene41%
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.
Arenaria interpres and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Arenaria interpres and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
334 taxa- Athene cunicularia4 sites
- Charadrius vociferus4 sites
- Phalaropus lobatus4 sites
- Tyto alba4 sites
- Alca torda3 sites
- Asio flammeus3 sites
- Aves3 sites
- Calidris melanotos3 sites
- Cathartes aura3 sites
- Charadrius semipalmatus3 sites
- Corvus corax3 sites
- Falco sparverius3 sites
- Nycticorax nycticorax3 sites
- Phalaropus fulicarius3 sites
- Phalaropus tricolor3 sites
- Pluvialis dominica3 sites
- Pluvialis squatarola3 sites
- Tringa semipalmata3 sites
- Actitis macularius2 sites
- Anas2 sites
- Anas bahamensis2 sites
- Anous stolidus2 sites
- Brachyramphus marmoratus2 sites
- Branta2 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 10 sites for Arenaria interpres, 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
9 references- Terminal Pleistocene–Holocene Avifauna of San Miguel and Santa Rosa Islands: Identifications of Previously Unidentified Avian Remains Recovered from Fossil Sites and Prehistoric Cave Deposits2
- A catalogue of British Pleistocene birds identified by Colin JO Harrison and stored in the Natural History Museum, London, (Department of Palaeontology)1
- The Northernmost Ruins of the Globe1
- Bird bones from Jettböle I, a site in the Neolithic Åland archipelago in the northern Baltic1
- Studies on Fossil and Extant Vertebrates from San Salvador (Watling's) Island, Bahamas1
- Extinction, biogeography, and human exploitation of birds on Tikopia and Anuta, Polynesian outliers in the Solomon Islands1
- Pleistocene and prehistoric birds of south-west Britain1
- The non-passerine Pleistocene avifauna of the Talara Tar Seeps, northwestern Peru1
- The late Pleistocene avifauna of La Carolina, southwestern Ecuador1
Each of the 10 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 content3
Picture of Arenaria interpres
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Chuck Homler d/b/a Focus On Wildlife
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
Structured light scan
- Source
- MorphoSource
- Licence
- In Copyright
- Commercial use
- cannot be read from the licence given — check the record
- Specimen
- Arenaria interpres · FMNH:Birds:313996
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 itArenaria through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Linnaeus 1758