Coua

Couas are large, mostly terrestrial birds of the cuckoo family, endemic to the island of Madagascar.

Coua

Merrittimages · 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
couaPBDB
Sits inside
CuculidaePBDB
Diet
insectivorePBDB, for Cuculidae
Life habit
volantPBDB, for Cuculidae
Motility
actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
Environment
terrestrialPBDB, for Cuculidae

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.

Pleistocene — about 6 of 21 occurrencesPleistoceneHolocene — about 15 of 21 occurrences147 ka–126 ka Mya — about 0.2 occurrences126 ka–105 ka Mya — about 1 occurrence105 ka–84 ka Mya — about 1 occurrence84 ka–63 ka Mya — about 1 occurrence63 ka–42 ka Mya — about 1 occurrence42 ka–21 ka Mya — about 1 occurrence21 ka–0 Mya — about 15 occurrences629 ka0 Mya

21 occurrences of Coua on record, most of them in the Holocene. 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

21 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.

Coua and its relatives

Holocene

Where Coua and its relatives were recorded in the Holocene.

Found in the same rock

143 taxa

The Paleobiology Database records 7 sites for Coua, 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

Each of the 21 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 content2

Picture of Coua

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

CT scan

Licence
In Copyright
Commercial use
cannot be read from the licence given — check the record
Specimen
Coua cristata pyropyga · FMNH:Birds:352801

Smithsonian Open Access was 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 itCuculidae through timeFormations of the HoloceneThe world it lived on

Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Schinz 1821