Brodavis
Brodavis is a genus of freshwater hesperornithiform birds known from the Late Cretaceous of North America and Asia. It was first described and named by Larry D. Martin, Evgeny N. Kurochkin and Tim T. Tokaryk in 2012 and assigned to a new monogeneric family, Brodavidae. Four species were described and assigned to Brodavis.

Filet 123 · 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- Sits inside
- BrodavidaePBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB, for Coelurosauria
- Life habit
- ground dwelling, solitaryPBDB, for Theropoda
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
- Environment
- marinePBDB, for Hesperornithiformes
Time the record covers
At most 18 million years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 83.6 Mya and 66 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
5 occurrences of Brodavis on record, most of them in the Late Cretaceous. 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
5 occurrences- Late Cretaceous100%
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
5 formations
- Pierre Shale Formation · Montana Group1
- Frenchman Formation1
- Hell Creek Formation · Montana Group1
- Nemegt Formation1
- Pierre Shale Formation1
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The named rock units Brodavis has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed.
Brodavis and its relatives
Late CretaceousWhere Brodavis and its relatives were recorded in the Late Cretaceous.
Found in the same rock
9 taxa- Hesperornis1 site
- Hesperornis chowi1 site
- Hesperornithiformes1 site
- Kuhnemys breviplastra1 site
- Mononykus olecranus1 site
- Nemegtemys conflata1 site
- Tarbosaurus bataar1 site
- Testudines1 site
- Trionychidae1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 5 sites for Brodavis, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too.
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 new evolutionary lineage of diving birds from the Late Cretaceous of North America and Asia3
- Hesperornithiformes (Aves: Ornithurae) from the Upper Cretaceous Pierre Shale, Southern Manitoba, Canada1
- A new species of the diving bird Baptornis (Ornithurae, Hesperonithiformes) from the lower Pierre Shale Group (Upper Cretaceous) of southwestern South Dakota1
Each of the 5 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 doi.org. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Brodavis
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Filet 123
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Brodavis 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, “Brodavis”
- 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 itBrodavidae through timeFormations of the Late CretaceousThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Martin et al. 2012