Mareca penelope
The Eurasian wigeon or European wigeon, also known as the widgeon or wigeon, is one of three extant species of wigeon in the dabbling duck genus Mareca. It is common and widespread within its Palearctic range.

Laitche · 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
- Eurasian wigeonPBDB
- Sits inside
- MarecaPBDB
- Diet
- herbivorePBDB, for Anseriformes
- Life habit
- volantPBDB, for Anseriformes
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Theropoda
Time the record covers
At least 117 thousand years on record.
The record covers at least 129 ka to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 2.58 Mya to 0 Mya.
16 occurrences of Mareca penelope 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
16 occurrences- Pleistocene94%
- Holocene6%
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.
Found in
2 formations
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The named rock units Mareca penelope has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 14 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Mareca penelope and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Mareca penelope and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
244 taxa- Anas platyrhynchos11 sites
- Anas crecca8 sites
- Anas acuta7 sites
- Anatidae6 sites
- Aythya ferina5 sites
- Mergus serrator5 sites
- Perdix perdix5 sites
- Accipiter nisus4 sites
- Alcelaphus buselaphus4 sites
- Anas4 sites
- Ardea cinerea4 sites
- Corvus monedula4 sites
- Falco tinnunculus4 sites
- Hippopotamus amphibius4 sites
- Lagopus lagopus4 sites
- Lagopus muta4 sites
- Lyrurus tetrix4 sites
- Mergellus albellus4 sites
- Milvus migrans4 sites
- Passeriformes4 sites
- Phalacrocorax carbo4 sites
- Pyrrhocorax graculus4 sites
- Spatula querquedula4 sites
- Tadorna ferruginea4 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 16 sites for Mareca penelope, 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
12 references- Kom Ombo: Preliminary Report on the Fauna of Late Paleolithic Sites in Upper Egypt3
- Late Pleistocene birds from Binagada (Azerbaijan) in collection of the National Museum of Natural History (Kyiv, Ukraine)2
- Birds of the Late Pleistocene and Holocene from the Palaeolithic Djuktai cave site of Yakutia, eastern Siberia2
- Bird remains from Curata and Bordu Mare caves (Romania)1
- The Middle Pleistocene avifauna of Spinagallo Cave (Sicily, Italy): preliminary report1
- The birds of the late Quaternary of the Altai Mts1
- Bird bones form Soldier's Hole Cheddar, Somerset1
- The Quaternary avifauna of Crete, Greece1
- Pleistocene and prehistoric birds of south-west Britain1
- Giacimento del Paleolitico inferiore a Malagrotta (Roma)1
- Birds of the Cromer Forest Bed series of the East Anglian Pleistocene1
- Relationships of the Late Pleistocene Vertebrate Fauna from Kom Ombo, Upper Egypt1
Each of the 16 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 Mareca penelope
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Laitche
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Mareca penelope 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 itMareca through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Linnaeus 1758)