Ovis ammon
The argali, also known as the mountain sheep, is the largest species of wild sheep. It is native to the highlands of western East Asia, the Himalayas, Tibet, and the Altai Mountains.
James Eaton · CC0 · 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
- argaliPBDB
- Sits inside
- OvisPBDB
- Diet
- grazer, browserPBDB, for Bovidae
- Life habit
- ground dwellingPBDB, for Bovidae
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Osteichthyes
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Artiodactyla
Time the record covers
At most 2.6 million years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 2.58 Mya and 0 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
6 occurrences of Ovis ammon on record, most of them in the Holocene. 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
6 occurrences- Pleistocene33%
- Holocene67%
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 Ovis ammon has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 3 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Ovis ammon and its relatives
HoloceneWhere Ovis ammon and its relatives were recorded in the Holocene.
Found in the same rock
117 taxa- Equus asinus4 sites
- Hyaena hyaena4 sites
- Lepus4 sites
- Bos primigenius3 sites
- Bos taurus3 sites
- Capra aegagrus3 sites
- Eudorcas rufifrons3 sites
- Euxerus erythropus3 sites
- Felis silvestris3 sites
- Genetta3 sites
- Giraffa camelopardalis3 sites
- Hystrix cristata3 sites
- Numida meleagris3 sites
- Phacochoerus aethiopicus3 sites
- Pila3 sites
- Struthio camelus3 sites
- Aves2 sites
- Bivalvia2 sites
- Bovidae2 sites
- Canis2 sites
- Canis aureus2 sites
- Canis lupus2 sites
- consobrina consobrina2 sites
- Corvus2 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 6 sites for Ovis ammon, 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- The Late Prehistory of the Eastern Sahel2
- A revision of the faunal remains from two central Sudanese sites: Khartoum Hospital and Esh Shaheinab1
- Wendorf and Schild, 19801
- Wendorf and Schild, 19761
- Ust'-Kanskaya peshchernaya paleoliticheskaya stoyanka1
Each of the 6 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 content2
Picture of Ovis ammon
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- James Eaton
- Licence
- CC0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
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, “Argali”
- 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 itOvis through timeFormations of the HoloceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Linnaeus 1758)