Aegotheles

Owlet-nightjars are small crepuscular birds related to the nightjars and frogmouths. Most are native to New Guinea, but some species extend to Australia, the Moluccas, and New Caledonia. A flightless species from New Zealand is extinct. There is a single monotypic family Aegothelidae with the genus Aegotheles.

Aegotheles

markaharper1 · 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
AegothelidaePBDB
Diet
insectivorePBDB, for Aegothelidae
Life habit
volantPBDB, for Aegothelidae
Motility
actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
Environment
terrestrialPBDB, for Aegothelidae

Time the record covers

At least 15 million years on record.

The record covers at least 15.9 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 18.7 Mya to 0 Mya.

Miocene — about 1 of 23 occurrencesMiocenePliocene — about 0 of 23 occurrencesPleistocene — about 4 of 23 occurrencesPleistocene19–19 Mya — about 0.1 occurrences19–18 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences18–17 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences17–17 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences17–16 Mya — about 0.2 occurrences16–15 Mya — about 0.0 occurrences640 ka–0 Mya — about 22 occurrences15.9 Mya11.7 ka19.2 Mya0 Mya

23 occurrences of Aegotheles 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

23 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.

Found in

1 formation

Bannockburn — 44.91°S, 169.86°E

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The named rock units Aegotheles has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 22 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.

Found in the same rock

260 taxa

The Paleobiology Database records 23 sites for Aegotheles, 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

9 references

Each of the 23 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 content1

Picture of Aegotheles

Credit
markaharper1
Licence
CC BY-SA 2.0
Commercial use
the licence allows it

No 3D scan of Aegotheles 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 itAegothelidae through timeThe world it lived on

Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Vigors and Horsfield 1827