Dendrocygna arborea
The West Indian whistling duck is a whistling duck that breeds in the Caribbean. Alternative names are black-billed whistling duck and Cuban whistling duck.

ZankaM · 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
- West Indian whistling duckPBDB
- Sits inside
- DendrocygnaPBDB
- Diet
- herbivorePBDB, for Anseriformes
- Life habit
- volantPBDB, for Anseriformes
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Theropoda
- Mass
- 54 gWikidata
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.
4 occurrences of Dendrocygna arborea 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
4 occurrences- Pleistocene68%
- Holocene32%
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.
Dendrocygna arborea and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Dendrocygna arborea and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
42 taxa- Geotrygon larva3 sites
- Geotrygon montana3 sites
- Nesotrochis debooyi3 sites
- Buteo jamaicensis2 sites
- Dendrocygna autumnalis2 sites
- Megascops nudipes2 sites
- Patagioenas inornata2 sites
- Patagioenas squamosa2 sites
- Turdus plumbeus ardosiaceus2 sites
- Zenaida aurita zenaida2 sites
- Agelaius xanthomus1 site
- Ammodramus savannarum1 site
- Antrostomus noctitherus1 site
- Buteo platypterus1 site
- Capella anthonyi1 site
- Caracara latebrosus1 site
- Coccyzus vieilloti1 site
- Columbina passerina1 site
- Corvus leucognaphalus1 site
- Eudocimus albus1 site
- Fulica podagrica1 site
- Gallus gallus1 site
- Hapalocrex flaviventer1 site
- Icterus portoricensis1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 4 sites for Dendrocygna arborea, 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- Bird remains from the caves of Porto Rico2
- Fossil birds from Barbados, West Indies1
- Bird remains from the West Indies1
Each of the 4 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 Dendrocygna arborea
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- ZankaM
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Dendrocygna arborea 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 itDendrocygna through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Linnaeus 1758)