Struthionidae

Uncredited · via Wikidata/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
- ostrichPBDB
- Sits inside
- StruthioniformesPBDB
- Diet
- herbivorePBDB, for Struthioniformes
- Life habit
- ground dwellingPBDB, for Struthioniformes
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Struthioniformes
Time the record covers
At least 11 million years on record.
The record covers at least 11.63 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 23.04 Mya to 0 Mya.
112 occurrences of Struthionidae 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
112 occurrences- Miocene26%
- Pliocene24%
- Pleistocene38%
- Holocene12%
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
30 formations
- Olduvai Formation · Vogel River Series Group14
- Varswater Formation4
- Nubia Formation3
- Vogel River Series Formation3
- Nawata Formation2
- Swartkrans Formation · Transvaal Group2
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The named rock units Struthionidae has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 6 further formations hold fewer occurrences each and are not listed. 58 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Struthionidae and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Struthionidae and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
1,253 taxa- Struthio53 sites
- Gazella36 sites
- Hipparion29 sites
- Bovidae25 sites
- Struthio camelus24 sites
- Reptilia23 sites
- Aves21 sites
- Equus21 sites
- Alcelaphini20 sites
- Mammalia20 sites
- Canis18 sites
- Cercopithecidae16 sites
- Clarias16 sites
- Amphibia15 sites
- Crocodylus15 sites
- Ceratotherium14 sites
- Osteichthyes14 sites
- Viverridae14 sites
- Giraffidae13 sites
- Hystrix13 sites
- Suidae13 sites
- Bovini12 sites
- Reduncini12 sites
- Tragelaphus12 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 107 sites for Struthionidae, 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
81 references- Catalogue of Tertiary Fossil Sites of the Land Mammals in the U.S.S.R.7
- Lothagam: the dawn of humanity in eastern Africa6
- Quaternary vertebrate fossil sites in the south-western Cape Province5
- The Late Prehistory of the Eastern Sahel4
- Laetoli: a Pliocene Site in Northern Tanzania3
- Bovidae3
- Travertines and Cave Deposits of the Kaap Escarpment of South Africa, and the Type Locality of Australopithecus Africanus Dart3
- Fossils from Mille-Logya, Afar, Ethiopia, elucidate the link between Pliocene environmental changes and Homo origins2
- First description of an ostrich from the late Miocene of Kerassia (Euboea, Greece): remarks on its cervical anatomy2
- First record of ostriches (Aves, Struthioniformes, Struthionidae) from the late Miocene of Bulgaria with taxonomic and zoogeographic discussion2
- Lakeside cemeteries in the Sahara: 5000 years of Holocene population and environmental change2
- Cainozoic mammals from coastal Namaqualand, South Africa2
Each of the 112 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. 69 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 content2

Picture of Struthionidae
- Source
- Wikidata/Commons
- Credit
- nobody named on the record
- Licence
- not stated by the source
- Commercial use
- cannot be read from the licence given — check the record
Smithsonian Open Access and MorphoSource were not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itStruthioniformes through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Vigors 1825