Macheiramphus alcinus

The bat hawk is a raptor found in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia to New Guinea. It is named for its diet, which consists mainly of bats. It requires open space in which to hunt, but will live anywhere from dense rainforest to semi-arid veld.

Macheiramphus alcinus

Johan van Rensburg · CC BY 2.0 · 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
bat hawkPBDB
Sits inside
MacheiramphusPBDB
Diet
carnivorePBDB, for Accipitridae
Life habit
volantPBDB, for Accipitridae
Motility
actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
Environment
terrestrialPBDB, for Accipitridae

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 9 of 9 occurrencesPleistoceneHolocene — about 0 of 9 occurrences147 ka–126 ka Mya — about 0.2 occurrences126 ka–105 ka Mya — about 2 occurrences105 ka–84 ka Mya — about 2 occurrences84 ka–63 ka Mya — about 2 occurrences63 ka–42 ka Mya — about 2 occurrences42 ka–21 ka Mya — about 2 occurrences21 ka–0 Mya — about 0.9 occurrences629 ka0 Mya

9 occurrences of Macheiramphus alcinus 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

9 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.

Macheiramphus alcinus and its relatives

Pleistocene

Where Macheiramphus alcinus and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.

Found in the same rock

6 taxa

The Paleobiology Database records 9 sites for Macheiramphus alcinus, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too.

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

1 reference

Each of the 9 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. Each entry links to doi.org. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.

Media and terms

Media content1

Picture of Macheiramphus alcinus

Credit
Johan van Rensburg
Licence
CC BY 2.0
Commercial use
the licence allows it

No 3D scan of Macheiramphus alcinus 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.

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 itMacheiramphus through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on

Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Bonaparte 1850