Bulweria bifax
Olson's petrel, also known as the small Saint Helena petrel or the Saint Helena Bulwer's petrel, is an extinct species of seabird in the family Procellariidae. It was endemic to Saint Helena.

Uncredited · Public Domain · 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
- Saint Helena Bulwer's petrelPBDB
- Sits inside
- BulweriaPBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB, for Coelurosauria
- Life habit
- ground dwelling, solitaryPBDB, for Theropoda
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
- Environment
- marinePBDB, for Procellariiformes
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.
6 occurrences of Bulweria bifax on record, most of them in the Pleistocene. 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
6 occurrences- Pleistocene50%
- Holocene50%
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.
Bulweria bifax and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Bulweria bifax and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
17 taxa- Pelagodroma marina6 sites
- Pterodroma rupinarum6 sites
- Aphanocrex podarces4 sites
- Puffinus lherminieri4 sites
- Dysmoropelia dekarchiskos3 sites
- Onychoprion fuscatus3 sites
- Puffinus pacificoides3 sites
- Charadrius sanctaehelenae2 sites
- Gygis alba2 sites
- Oceanodroma castro2 sites
- Porzana astrictocarpus2 sites
- Ardenna grisea1 site
- Fregata ariel1 site
- Larus1 site
- Puffinus1 site
- Sula dactylatra1 site
- Upupa antaios1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 6 sites for Bulweria bifax, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too.
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
1 referenceEach of the 6 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. Each entry links to doi.org. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Bulweria bifax
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- nobody named on the record
- Licence
- Public Domain
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Bulweria bifax was found in Sketchfab.
Smithsonian Open Access and MorphoSource were 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 itBulweria through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Olson 1975