Nesotrochis debooyi
The Antillean cave rail, also known as DeBooy's rail, is an extinct species of flightless bird which occurred on Puerto Rico and the United States Virgin Islands.

Wetmore · Public Domain · 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
- Antillean cave railPBDB
- Sits inside
- NesotrochisPBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB, for Coelurosauria
- Life habit
- ground dwelling, solitaryPBDB, for Theropoda
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Theropoda
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.
10 occurrences of Nesotrochis debooyi on record, most of them in the Holocene. 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
10 occurrences- Pleistocene36%
- Holocene64%
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.
Nesotrochis debooyi and its relatives
HoloceneWhere Nesotrochis debooyi and its relatives were recorded in the Holocene.
Found in the same rock
61 taxa- Nyctanassa violacea5 sites
- Corvus leucognaphalus3 sites
- Dendrocygna arborea3 sites
- Geotrygon larva3 sites
- Geotrygon montana3 sites
- Megascops nudipes3 sites
- Patagioenas inornata3 sites
- Patagioenas squamosa3 sites
- Puffinus lherminieri3 sites
- Sula leucogaster3 sites
- Turdus plumbeus ardosiaceus3 sites
- Zenaida aurita zenaida3 sites
- Anous stolidus2 sites
- Corvus pumilis2 sites
- Fregata magnificens2 sites
- Gallus gallus2 sites
- Ionornis martinica2 sites
- Mareca americana2 sites
- Patagioenas leucocephala2 sites
- Pelecanus occidentalis2 sites
- Phoenicopterus ruber2 sites
- Sula sula2 sites
- Thalasseus maximus2 sites
- Agelaius xanthomus1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 10 sites for Nesotrochis debooyi, 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
5 references- Bird remains from the caves of Porto Rico4
- Bird remains from pre-Columbian middens in the Virgin Islands2
- Bones of birds collected by Theodoor de Booy from kitchen midden deposits in the islands of St. Thomas and St. Croix2
- Bird remains from the West Indies1
- Ancient records of birds from the island of St. Croix with observations on extinct and living birds of Puerto Rico1
Each of the 10 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 Nesotrochis debooyi
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Wetmore
- Licence
- Public Domain
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Nesotrochis debooyi 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 itNesotrochis through timeFormations of the HoloceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Wetmore 1918