Coua ruficeps
The red-capped coua is a species of cuckoo in the family Cuculidae. It is endemic to northwest Madagascar.

Лариса Артемьева · CC0 · 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
- red-capped 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.
2 occurrences of Coua ruficeps 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
2 occurrences- Pleistocene46%
- Holocene55%
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 ruficeps and its relatives
HoloceneWhere Coua ruficeps and its relatives were recorded in the Holocene.
Found in the same rock
51 taxa- Athene superciliaris2 sites
- Buteo brachypterus2 sites
- Coracopsis vasa2 sites
- Coua cristata2 sites
- Coua gigas2 sites
- Milvus migrans aegyptius2 sites
- Numida meleagris2 sites
- Oena capensis2 sites
- Otus rutilus2 sites
- Phedina borbonica2 sites
- Ploceus sakalava2 sites
- Pterocles personatus2 sites
- Streptopelia picturata2 sites
- Turnix nigricollis2 sites
- Tyto alba2 sites
- Accipiter henstii1 site
- Accipiter madagascariensis1 site
- Accipitridae1 site
- Aepyornis1 site
- Alopochen sirabensis1 site
- Anas1 site
- Anhinga melanogaster1 site
- Apus balstoni1 site
- Ardea humbloti1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 2 sites for Coua ruficeps, 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
2 references- Subfossil birds from a submerged cave in southwestern Madagascar1
- Bird fossils from Ankilitelo Cave: inference about Holocene environmental changes in southwestern Madagascar1
Each of the 2 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 ruficeps
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Лариса Артемьева
- Licence
- CC0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Coua ruficeps was found in MorphoSource and Sketchfab.
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 itCoua through timeFormations of the HoloceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Gray 1846