Zapornia

Zapornia is a recently revalidated genus of birds in the rail family Rallidae; it was included in Porzana for much of the late 20th century. These smallish to tiny rails are found across most of the world, but are entirely absent from the Americas except as wind-blown stray birds. A number of species, and probably an even larger number of prehistorically extinct ones, are known only from small Pacific islands; several of these lost the ability to fly in the absence of terrestrial predators. They are somewhat less aquatic than Porzana proper, inhabiting the edges of wetlands, reedbelts, but also drier grass- and shrubland and in some cases open forest.

Zapornia

Peter Jacobs from Australia · 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
Sits inside
RallidaePBDB
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.

Pleistocene — about 5 of 40 occurrencesPleistoceneHolocene — about 35 of 40 occurrences147 ka–126 ka Mya — about 0.1 occurrences126 ka–105 ka Mya — about 0.9 occurrences105 ka–84 ka Mya — about 0.9 occurrences84 ka–63 ka Mya — about 0.9 occurrences63 ka–42 ka Mya — about 0.9 occurrences42 ka–21 ka Mya — about 0.9 occurrences21 ka–0 Mya — about 35 occurrences629 ka0 Mya

40 occurrences of Zapornia 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

40 occurrences

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.

Zapornia and its relatives

Holocene

Where Zapornia and its relatives were recorded in the Holocene.

Found in the same rock

243 taxa

The Paleobiology Database records 40 sites for Zapornia, 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

17 references

Each of the 40 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. 5 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 Zapornia

Credit
Peter Jacobs from Australia
Licence
CC BY-SA 2.0
Commercial use
the licence allows it

No 3D scan of Zapornia was found in MorphoSource and Sketchfab.

Smithsonian Open Access was 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 itRallidae through timeFormations of the HoloceneThe world it lived on

Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Leach 1816