Collocalia esculenta
The glossy swiftlet is a species of swift in the family Apodidae. It is found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi and eastwards to New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago and the Solomon Islands.

Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE · CC BY-SA 2.0 · 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
- glossy swiftletPBDB
- Sits inside
- CollocaliaPBDB
- Diet
- insectivorePBDB, for Apodidae
- Life habit
- volantPBDB, for Apodidae
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Apodidae
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.
14 occurrences of Collocalia esculenta 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
14 occurrences- Pleistocene70%
- Holocene30%
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.
Collocalia esculenta and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Collocalia esculenta and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
150 taxa- Passeriformes7 sites
- Apodidae5 sites
- Columbidae5 sites
- Gallirallus philippensis4 sites
- Accipiter efficax3 sites
- Anura3 sites
- Chiropodomys3 sites
- Chiroptera3 sites
- Columba vitiensis3 sites
- Crocidura3 sites
- Gallirallus3 sites
- Gallirallus lafresnayanus3 sites
- Gekkonidae3 sites
- Hipposideros3 sites
- Lacertilia3 sites
- Mammalia3 sites
- Muridae3 sites
- Ninox novaeseelandiae3 sites
- Porphyrio3 sites
- Porphyrio kukwiedei3 sites
- Porphyrio melanotus3 sites
- Pteropodidae3 sites
- Ptilinopus3 sites
- Rallidae3 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 14 sites for Collocalia esculenta, 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
5 references- Late Pleistocene-Holocene non-passerine avifauna of Liang Bua (Flores, Indonesia)5
- Late Quaternary terrestrial vertebrates from Palawan Islad, Philippines3
- Prehistoric birds from New Ireland, Papua New Guinea: extinctions on a large Melanesian island3
- Faunal extinction and human habitation in New Caledonia: initial results and implications of new research at the Pindai Caves2
- Fossil birds from late Quaternary deposits in New Caledonia1
Each of the 14 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 content1
Picture of Collocalia esculenta
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 2.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Collocalia esculenta 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 itCollocalia through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Linnaeus 1758)