Puffinus lherminieri
The Sargasso shearwater is a small tropical seabird in the petrel family. The only shearwater to nest primarily in the Caribbean, it ranges throughout the western Atlantic during the non-breeding season. Its specific epithet honours the French naturalist Félix Louis L'Herminier.

dominic sherony · CC BY-SA 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
- Audubon's shearwaterPBDB
- Sits inside
- PuffinusPBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB, for Coelurosauria
- Life habit
- ground dwelling, solitaryPBDB, for Theropoda
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
- Environment
- marinePBDB, for Procellariiformes
Time the record covers
At least 3.5 million years on record.
The record covers at least 3.6 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 5.333 Mya to 0 Mya.
56 occurrences of Puffinus lherminieri on record. 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
56 occurrences- Pliocene2%
- Pleistocene14%
- Holocene84%
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
1 formation
- Yorktown Formation · Chesapeake Group1
Loading coastlines…
The named rock units Puffinus lherminieri has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 55 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Found in the same rock
704 taxa- Phaethon lepturus18 sites
- Anous stolidus11 sites
- Gallus gallus10 sites
- Rattus10 sites
- Ardenna pacifica9 sites
- Onychoprion fuscatus9 sites
- Sula sula9 sites
- Macrotus waterhousii8 sites
- Anolis sagrei7 sites
- Pteropus7 sites
- Fregata ariel6 sites
- Nyctanassa violacea6 sites
- Pelagodroma marina6 sites
- Pterodroma rupinarum6 sites
- Sula leucogaster6 sites
- Aphanocrex podarces5 sites
- Aplonis opaca5 sites
- Athene cunicularia5 sites
- Capromys5 sites
- Emballonura semicaudata5 sites
- Gygis alba5 sites
- Megapodius laperouse5 sites
- Passeriformes5 sites
- Patagioenas leucocephala5 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 56 sites for Puffinus lherminieri, 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
26 references- Fossil vertebrates from Palau, Micronesia: a resource assessment7
- Late Quaternary fossil vertebrates from the Cayman Islands7
- Paleornithology of St. Helena Island, South Atlantic Ocean7
- Extinction, biogeography, and human exploitation of birds on Tikopia and Anuta, Polynesian outliers in the Solomon Islands5
- The avifauna of Réunion Island (Mascarene Islands) at the time of the arrival of the first Europeans4
- Extinct and extirpated birds from Rota, Mariana Islands3
- Prehistoric extinction of birds on Mangaia, Cook Islands, Polynesia2
- Fossil vertebrates from Antigua, Lesser Antilles: evidence for late Holocene human-caused extinctions in the West Indies2
- Bird remains from pre-Columbian middens in the Virgin Islands2
- The prehistory and biogeography of terrestrial vertebrates on Guam, Mariana Islands1
- Introduced delicacy or native species? A natural origin of Bermudian terrapins supported by fossil and genetic data1
- Exceptionally well preserved late Quaternary plant and vertebrate fossils from a blue hole on Abaco, The Bahamas1
Each of the 56 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. 14 further references are not listed. 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 Puffinus lherminieri
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- dominic sherony
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 2.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Puffinus lherminieri 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 itPuffinus through timeThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Lesson 1839