Macropygia
Macropygia is a genus of bird in the pigeon and dove family Columbidae. The genus is one of three genera known as cuckoo-doves. They are long tailed, range between 27 and 45 cm in length and have brown plumage. The genus now ranges from India and China through Indonesia and the Philippines to Vanuatu and Australia, though they originated from North and South America.

markaharper1 · CC BY-SA 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- Sits inside
- ColumbidaePBDB
- Diet
- frugivore, granivorePBDB, for Columbidae
- Life habit
- volantPBDB, for Columbidae
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Columbidae
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.
11 occurrences of Macropygia 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
11 occurrences- Pleistocene70%
- Holocene30%
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.
Macropygia and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Macropygia and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
113 taxa- Columbidae5 sites
- Collocalia esculenta4 sites
- Gallirallus philippensis3 sites
- Gallus gallus3 sites
- Passeriformes3 sites
- Ptilinopus3 sites
- Rallidae3 sites
- Tyto3 sites
- Amaurornis olivacea2 sites
- Anas superciliosa2 sites
- Apodidae2 sites
- Ardenna pacifica2 sites
- Centropus2 sites
- Columba vitiensis2 sites
- Cuculidae2 sites
- Ducula2 sites
- Gallirallus2 sites
- Gygis alba2 sites
- Haliastur indus2 sites
- Loriinae2 sites
- Megapodius2 sites
- Porphyrio2 sites
- Procellariidae2 sites
- Pseudobulweria rostrata2 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 10 sites for Macropygia, 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
6 references- Late Pleistocene-Holocene non-passerine avifauna of Liang Bua (Flores, Indonesia)4
- Prehistoric birds from New Ireland, Papua New Guinea: extinctions on a large Melanesian island3
- Avifauna from the Teouma Lapita site, Efate Island, Vanuatu, including a new genus and species of megapode1
- First record of avian extinctions from the Late Pleistocene and Holocene of Timor Leste1
- Extinction and biogeography of birds on Huahine, Society Islands, French Polynesia1
- Prehistoric extinction of birds on Mangaia, Cook Islands, Polynesia1
Each of the 11 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 Macropygia
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- markaharper1
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 2.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Macropygia 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
- Source
- Wikipedia, “Macropygia”
- 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 itColumbidae through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Swainson 1837