Rangifer tarandus caribou
The boreal woodland caribou, also known as Eastern woodland caribou, boreal forest caribou and forest-dwelling caribou, is a North American subspecies of reindeer found primarily in Canada with small populations in the United States. Unlike the Porcupine caribou and barren-ground caribou, boreal woodland caribou are primarily sedentary.

Steve Forrest · 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
- North American woodland caribouPBDB
- Sits inside
- Rangifer tarandusPBDB
- Diet
- grazer, browserPBDB, for Cervidae
- Life habit
- ground dwellingPBDB, for Cervidae
- 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.
3 occurrences of Rangifer tarandus caribou 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
3 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.
Rangifer tarandus caribou and its relatives
HoloceneWhere Rangifer tarandus caribou and its relatives were recorded in the Holocene.
Found in the same rock
33 taxa- Chlamys (Chlamys) islandica2 sites
- Chlamys tenuicostatus2 sites
- Mactra2 sites
- Mercenaria mercenaria2 sites
- Mya (Arenomya) arenaria2 sites
- Mytilus edulis2 sites
- Neogale vison2 sites
- Odocoileus virginianus2 sites
- Ostrea edulis2 sites
- Phoca vitulina2 sites
- Ursus americanus2 sites
- Alces americanus1 site
- Anatidae1 site
- Ardea herodias1 site
- Bison antiquus1 site
- Buccinum undatum1 site
- Busycon carica1 site
- Canis1 site
- Castor canadensis1 site
- Chondrichthyes1 site
- Equus conversidens1 site
- Felis1 site
- Ficus1 site
- Homo sapiens1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 3 sites for Rangifer tarandus caribou, 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
2 references- An Account of Some Kjoekkenmoeddings, or Shell-Heaps, in Maine and Massachusetts2
- Pleistocene ungulates from the Bow River gravels at Cochrane, Alberta1
Each of the 3 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. Each entry links to doi.org. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Rangifer tarandus caribou
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Steve Forrest
- Licence
- CC BY 2.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Rangifer tarandus caribou 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 itRangifer tarandus through timeFormations of the HoloceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Gmelin 1788)