Coua gigas
via iDigBio · CC BY · via iDigBio. 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
- giant couaPBDB
- Sits inside
- CouaPBDB
- 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.
5 occurrences of Coua gigas 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
5 occurrences- Pleistocene36%
- Holocene64%
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 gigas and its relatives
HoloceneWhere Coua gigas and its relatives were recorded in the Holocene.
Found in the same rock
95 taxa- Coua cristata4 sites
- Numida meleagris4 sites
- Accipiter madagascariensis3 sites
- Eurystomus glaucurus3 sites
- Leptosomus discolor3 sites
- Lophotibis cristata3 sites
- Archaeolemur edwardsi2 sites
- Athene superciliaris2 sites
- Avahi cleesei2 sites
- Babakotia radofilai2 sites
- Buteo2 sites
- Buteo brachypterus2 sites
- Capra aegagrus2 sites
- cf. Boophinae indet.2 sites
- Chaerephon leucogastert2 sites
- Cheirogaleus medius2 sites
- Coracopsis nigra2 sites
- Coracopsis vasa2 sites
- Coua ruficeps2 sites
- Cryptoprocta2 sites
- Cryptoprocta ferox2 sites
- Dryolimnas cuvieri2 sites
- Eliurus2 sites
- Erymnochelys madagascariensis2 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 4 sites for Coua gigas, 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
3 references- Subfossil lemur discoveries from the Beanka Protected Area in western Madagascar2
- Bird fossils from Ankilitelo Cave: inference about Holocene environmental changes in southwestern Madagascar2
- Subfossil birds from a submerged cave in southwestern Madagascar1
Each of the 5 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 Coua gigas
- Source
- iDigBio
- Credit
- via iDigBio
- Licence
- CC BY
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Coua gigas 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.
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itCoua through timeFormations of the HoloceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Boddaert 1783)