Coragyps occidentalis

Coragyps occidentalis, the Pleistocene black vulture, is an extinct species of New World vulture that lived throughout North and South America during the Pleistocene. It was formerly thought to be the ancestor to the modern black vulture, but is now thought to have evolved from it; the modern black vulture is paraphyletic with respect to it.

Coragyps occidentalis

Jonathan Chen · 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
Sits inside
CoragypsPBDB
Diet
carnivorePBDB, for Cathartidae
Life habit
volantPBDB, for Cathartidae
Motility
actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
Environment
terrestrialPBDB, for Cathartidae

Time the record covers

At most 199 thousand years on record.

Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 210 ka and 11.7 ka, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.

Pleistocene — about 11 of 11 occurrencesPleistoceneHolocene — about 0 of 11 occurrences213 ka–189 ka Mya — about 0.4 occurrences189 ka–166 ka Mya — about 0.5 occurrences166 ka–142 ka Mya — about 0.5 occurrences142 ka–118 ka Mya — about 1 occurrence118 ka–95 ka Mya — about 2 occurrences95 ka–71 ka Mya — about 2 occurrences71 ka–47 ka Mya — about 2 occurrences47 ka–24 ka Mya — about 2 occurrences24 ka–0 Mya — about 0.9 occurrences710 ka0 Mya

11 occurrences of Coragyps occidentalis 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

11 occurrences

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.

Coragyps occidentalis and its relatives

Pleistocene

Where Coragyps occidentalis and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.

Found in the same rock

445 taxa

The Paleobiology Database records 11 sites for Coragyps occidentalis, 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

Each of the 11 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 Coragyps occidentalis

Credit
Jonathan Chen
Licence
CC BY-SA 4.0
Commercial use
the licence allows it

No 3D scan of Coragyps occidentalis 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 itCoragyps through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on

Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Miller 1909)