Melanerpes erythrocephalus
The red-headed woodpecker is a mid-sized woodpecker found in temperate North America. Its breeding habitat is open country across southern Canada and the east-central United States. It is rated as least concern on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)'s Red List of Endangered species, having been down-listed from near threatened in 2018.

Mdf · 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
- red-headed woodpeckerPBDB
- Sits inside
- MelanerpesPBDB
- Diet
- insectivorePBDB, for Picidae
- Life habit
- volantPBDB, for Picidae
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Picidae
- Mass
- 71.6 gWikidata
Time the record covers
At least 81 thousand years on record.
The record covers at least 210 ka to 129 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 1.4 Mya to 11.7 ka.
4 occurrences of Melanerpes erythrocephalus 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
4 occurrences- Pleistocene100%
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.
Melanerpes erythrocephalus and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Melanerpes erythrocephalus and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
328 taxa- Cryptotis parva4 sites
- Odocoileus virginianus4 sites
- Scalopus aquaticus4 sites
- Blarina carolinensis3 sites
- Charadrius vociferus3 sites
- Colaptes auratus3 sites
- Dasypus bellus3 sites
- Ectopistes migratorius3 sites
- Geomys pinetis3 sites
- Hemiauchenia macrocephala3 sites
- Megascops asio3 sites
- Mephitis mephitis3 sites
- Microtus pinetorum3 sites
- Neotoma floridana3 sites
- Peromyscus polionotus3 sites
- Spatula discors3 sites
- Spilogale putorius3 sites
- Toxostoma rufum3 sites
- Zenaida macroura3 sites
- Accipiter cooperii2 sites
- Accipiter striatus2 sites
- Agelaius phoeniceus2 sites
- Amblystoma2 sites
- Ammodramus henslowii2 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 4 sites for Melanerpes erythrocephalus, 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
4 references- Avian community, climate, and sea-level changes in the Plio-Pleistocene of the Florida Peninsula1
- A Pleistocene avifauna from Haile, Florida1
- The Pleistocene vertebrate fauna of Reddick, Florida1
- Notes on fossil and subfossil birds1
Each of the 4 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 Melanerpes erythrocephalus
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Mdf
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan was found. Smithsonian Open Access, MorphoSource and Sketchfab were all searched.
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 itMelanerpes through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Linnaeus 1758)