Agelaius xanthomus
The yellow-shouldered blackbird, known in Puerto Rican Spanish as mariquita de Puerto Rico or capitán, is a species of blackbird endemic to Puerto Rico. It has black plumage with a prominent yellow patch on the wing. Adult males and females are of similar appearance. The species is predominantly insectivorous.

Mike Morel/U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service · Public Domain · 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
- yellow-shouldered blackbirdPBDB
- Sits inside
- AgelaiusPBDB
- Diet
- insectivore, frugivorePBDB, for Icteridae
- Life habit
- volantPBDB, for Icteridae
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Icteridae
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.
2 occurrences of Agelaius xanthomus 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
2 occurrences- Pleistocene91%
- Holocene9%
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.
Agelaius xanthomus and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Agelaius xanthomus and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
45 taxa- Antrostomus noctitherus2 sites
- Capella anthonyi2 sites
- Coccyzus vieilloti2 sites
- Columbina passerina2 sites
- Geotrygon larva2 sites
- Geotrygon montana2 sites
- Icterus portoricensis2 sites
- Margarops fuscatus2 sites
- Megascops nudipes2 sites
- Melanerpes portoricensis2 sites
- Mimus polyglottos2 sites
- Nesospingus speculiferus2 sites
- Patagioenas inornata2 sites
- Patagioenas leucocephala2 sites
- Patagioenas squamosa2 sites
- Spindalis portoricensis2 sites
- Turdus plumbeus ardosiaceus2 sites
- Tyrannus caudifasciatus taylori2 sites
- Tyrannus dominicensis2 sites
- Zenaida aurita zenaida2 sites
- Accipiter striatus1 site
- Ammodramus savannarum1 site
- Aves1 site
- Brachyphylla cavernarum1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 2 sites for Agelaius xanthomus, 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
1 referenceEach of the 2 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 the Paleobiology Database's own record for the work.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Agelaius xanthomus
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Mike Morel/U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service
- Licence
- Public Domain
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Agelaius xanthomus 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 itAgelaius through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Sclater 1862)