Martes martes
The European pine marten, also known as the pine marten, is a mustelid native to and widespread in most of Europe, Asia Minor, the Caucasus, and parts of Iran, Iraq, and Syria. It is listed as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List. It is less commonly known as baum marten or sweet marten.

caroline legg · 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
- European pine martenPBDB
- Sits inside
- MartesPBDB
- Diet
- carnivore, omnivorePBDB, for Mustelidae
- Life habit
- scansorialPBDB, for Martes
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Osteichthyes
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Eutheria
Time the record covers
At least 762 thousand years on record.
The record covers at least 774 ka to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 2.58 Mya to 0 Mya.
14 occurrences of Martes martes 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
14 occurrences- Pleistocene78%
- Holocene22%
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 Martes martes has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 12 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Martes martes and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Martes martes and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
228 taxa- Canis lupus8 sites
- Sus scrofa8 sites
- Capreolus capreolus7 sites
- Vulpes vulpes7 sites
- Bos primigenius5 sites
- Cervus elaphus5 sites
- Alces alces4 sites
- Cervus4 sites
- Equus4 sites
- Megaloceros4 sites
- Microtus4 sites
- Myodes4 sites
- Panthera pardus4 sites
- Ursus4 sites
- Ursus arctos4 sites
- Apodemus sylvaticus3 sites
- Capra ibex3 sites
- Castor fiber3 sites
- Felis3 sites
- Glis glis3 sites
- Lynx lynx3 sites
- Martes foina3 sites
- Meles meles3 sites
- Microtus agrestis3 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 14 sites for Martes martes, 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
11 references- I giacimenti Quaternari di vertebrati fossili nell'Italia Nord-Orientale3
- Die jungpleistozänen Säugetierfaunen aus dem Travertingebiet von Taubach-Weimar-Ehringsdorf (The Early Plestocene mammalian fauna from the travetin-area of Taubach-Weimar-Ehringsdorf)2
- Paleolithic subsistence strategies and changes in site use at Klissoura Cave 1 (Peloponnese, Greece)1
- Pleistocene Mustelidae (Carnivora) from Paleolithic site in Kudaro Caves in the Caucasus1
- Declining foraging returns from an inexhaustible resource? Abundance indices and beluga whaling in the western Canadian Arctic1
- Missing mammals from mesolithic middens: A comparison of the fossil and archaeological records from Scotland1
- The Weichselian (c. 115,000 - 10,000 B.P.) vertebrate fauna of Norway1
- Mittelpleistozane Saugetierfaunen aus Mitteleuropa - der Versuch einer biostratigraphischen Zuordnung1
- Un cas peu commun de conservation de certains tetrapodes dans le syteme karstique de Cerbului (Roumanie). [An uncommon case of the preservation of certain Tetrapoda in the Cerbului karst system, Romania1
- Pleistocene and Holocene mammalian faunas from the Maasvlakete near Rotterdam (The Netherlands)1
- La grotte de l'Observatoire à Monaco1
Each of the 14 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 Martes martes
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- caroline legg
- Licence
- CC BY 2.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Martes martes 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 itMartes through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Linnaeus 1758)