Lagopus lagopus
The willow ptarmigan is a bird in the grouse tribe Tetraonini of the pheasant family Phasianidae. It is also known as the willow grouse. The willow ptarmigan breeds in birch and other forests and moorlands in northern Europe, the tundra of Scandinavia, Siberia, Alaska, and Canada, in particular in the provinces of Newfoundland and Labrador and Quebec. It is the state bird of Alaska.

Yathin S Krishnappa · CC BY-SA 3.0 · 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
- willow ptarmiganPBDB
- Sits inside
- LagopusPBDB
- Diet
- granivorePBDB, for Phasianidae
- Life habit
- volantPBDB, for Phasianidae
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Phasianidae
- Mass
- 720 gWikidata
Time the record covers
At most 2.6 million years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 2.58 Mya and 0 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
24 occurrences of Lagopus lagopus 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
24 occurrences- Pleistocene46%
- Holocene54%
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.
Lagopus lagopus and its relatives
HoloceneWhere Lagopus lagopus and its relatives were recorded in the Holocene.
Found in the same rock
234 taxa- Anatidae9 sites
- Lagopus muta9 sites
- Lyrurus tetrix8 sites
- Anas crecca7 sites
- Corvus corax7 sites
- Corvus monedula6 sites
- Perdix perdix6 sites
- Turdus pilaris6 sites
- Anas platyrhynchos5 sites
- Tetrao urogallus5 sites
- Turdus merula5 sites
- Turdus philomelos5 sites
- Garrulus glandarius4 sites
- Gavia4 sites
- Gavia arctica4 sites
- Mareca penelope4 sites
- Rangifer tarandus4 sites
- Tetraonidae4 sites
- Anas3 sites
- Corvus corone3 sites
- Gavia stellata3 sites
- Hirundo rustica3 sites
- Perisoreus infaustus3 sites
- Rana temporaria3 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 24 sites for Lagopus lagopus, 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
10 references- Birds in Finnish prehistory9
- A catalogue of British Pleistocene birds identified by Colin JO Harrison and stored in the Natural History Museum, London, (Department of Palaeontology)6
- Birds of the Late Pleistocene and Holocene from the Palaeolithic Djuktai cave site of Yakutia, eastern Siberia2
- Declining foraging returns from an inexhaustible resource? Abundance indices and beluga whaling in the western Canadian Arctic1
- The birds of the late Quaternary of the Altai Mts1
- Central Inuit Household Economies: Zooarchaeology, Environmental, and Historical Evidence from Outer Frobisher Bay, Baffin Island, Canada1
- Bird bones form Soldier's Hole Cheddar, Somerset1
- Pleistocene and prehistoric birds of south-west Britain1
- Kangiguksuk: A Cultural Reconstruction of a Sixteenth Century Eskimo Site in Northern Alaska1
- Ust'-Kanskaya peshchernaya paleoliticheskaya stoyanka1
Each of the 24 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 content3
Picture of Lagopus lagopus
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Yathin S Krishnappa
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
CT scan
- Source
- MorphoSource
- Licence
- In Copyright
- Commercial use
- cannot be read from the licence given — check the record
- Specimen
- Lagopus lagopus · umzc:vertebrates:UMZC_uncatalogued_frozen18
3D model
- Source
- Sketchfab
- Licence
- CC Attribution
- Commercial use
- cannot be read from the licence given — check the record
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 itLagopus through timeFormations of the HoloceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Linnaeus 1758)