Butorides virescens
The green heron is a small heron of North and Central America. Butorides is from Middle English butor "bittern" and Ancient Greek -oides, "resembling", and virescens is Latin for "greenish".

Chuck Homler d/b/a Focus On Wildlife · 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
- green heronPBDB
- Sits inside
- ButoridesPBDB
- Diet
- piscivorePBDB, for Ardeidae
- Life habit
- volantPBDB, for Ardeidae
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Ardeidae
Time the record covers
At least 198 thousand years on record.
The record covers at least 210 ka to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 1.4 Mya to 0 Mya.
9 occurrences of Butorides virescens 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
9 occurrences- Pleistocene77%
- Holocene23%
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
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The named rock units Butorides virescens has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 8 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Butorides virescens and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Butorides virescens and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
411 taxa- Fulica americana6 sites
- Podilymbus podiceps6 sites
- Zenaida macroura6 sites
- Tyto alba5 sites
- Anas crecca carolinensis4 sites
- Anas platyrhynchos4 sites
- Ardea alba4 sites
- Ardea herodias4 sites
- Branta canadensis4 sites
- Buteo jamaicensis4 sites
- Cathartes aura4 sites
- Ciconia maltha4 sites
- Coragyps atratus4 sites
- Corvus brachyrhynchos4 sites
- Dasypus bellus4 sites
- Didelphis virginiana4 sites
- Gallinula chloropus4 sites
- Gymnogyps californianus4 sites
- Hemiauchenia macrocephala4 sites
- Mammut americanum4 sites
- Porzana carolina4 sites
- Rallus elegans4 sites
- Teratornis merriami4 sites
- Accipiter cooperii3 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 9 sites for Butorides virescens, 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
8 references- Avian community, climate, and sea-level changes in the Plio-Pleistocene of the Florida Peninsula2
- Prehistoric exploitation of birds on the Pacific coast of Chiapas, Mexico1
- Studies on Fossil and Extant Vertebrates from San Salvador (Watling's) Island, Bahamas1
- Bird remains from pre-Columbian middens in the Virgin Islands1
- A Pleistocene avifauna from Haile, Florida1
- The fossil avifauna of Itchtucknee River, Florida1
- The fossil Birds of California1
- The avifauna of the Pleistocene in Florida1
Each of the 9 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 content3
Picture of Butorides virescens
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Chuck Homler d/b/a Focus On Wildlife
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
CT scan
- Source
- MorphoSource
- Licence
- not stated by the source
- Commercial use
- cannot be read from the licence given — check the record
- Specimen
- BUTORIDES VIRESCENS · UF:Birds:52659
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
- Source
- Wikipedia, “Green heron”
- 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 itButorides through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Linnaeus 1758)