Anthus spinoletta
The water pipit is a small passerine bird which breeds in the mountains of Southern Europe and the Palearctic eastwards to China. It is a short-distance migrant; many birds move to lower altitudes or wet open lowlands in winter.

Zeynel Cebeci · CC BY-SA 4.0 · 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
- water pipitPBDB
- Sits inside
- AnthusPBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB, for Coelurosauria
- Life habit
- ground dwelling, solitaryPBDB, for Theropoda
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Theropoda
- Mass
- 2.73 gWikidata
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.
3 occurrences of Anthus spinoletta 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.
Anthus spinoletta and its relatives
HoloceneWhere Anthus spinoletta and its relatives were recorded in the Holocene.
Found in the same rock
262 taxa- Corvus corone2 sites
- Hyla2 sites
- Motacilla alba2 sites
- Rana2 sites
- Turdus philomelos2 sites
- Turdus viscivorus2 sites
- Accipiter striatus1 site
- Accipitridae1 site
- Acrocephalus arundinaceus1 site
- Actitis macularius1 site
- Aegolius acadicus1 site
- Aenocyon dirus1 site
- Agelaius phoeniceus1 site
- Alauda arvensis1 site
- Alca torda1 site
- Alle alle1 site
- Amblystoma1 site
- Anas crecca1 site
- Anas platyrhynchos1 site
- Anatidae1 site
- Anguilla1 site
- Anguispira alternata1 site
- Apodemus sylvaticus1 site
- Apus apus1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 3 sites for Anthus spinoletta, 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
3 references- A catalogue of British Pleistocene birds identified by Colin JO Harrison and stored in the Natural History Museum, London, (Department of Palaeontology)1
- Biostratigraphy of amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals in Corsica and the role of man in the Holocene faunal turnover1
- The Clark's Cave bone deposit and the Late Pleistocene paleoecology of the central Appalachian Mountains of Virginia1
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. 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 Anthus spinoletta
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Zeynel Cebeci
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Anthus spinoletta 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
- Source
- Wikipedia, “Water pipit”
- 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 itAnthus through timeFormations of the HoloceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Linnaeus 1758)