Cairina moschata
The Muscovy duck is a species of duck native to the Americas, from the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas and Mexico south to Argentina and Uruguay. The species has been domesticated, and feral Muscovy ducks can be found locally in New Zealand, Australia, the United States, and in Central and Eastern Europe.

Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE · 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- Also called
- muscovy duckPBDB
- Sits inside
- CairinaPBDB
- Diet
- herbivorePBDB, for Anseriformes
- Life habit
- volantPBDB, for Anseriformes
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Theropoda
- Mass
- 74 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.
6 occurrences of Cairina moschata 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
6 occurrences- Pleistocene50%
- Holocene50%
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.
Cairina moschata and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Cairina moschata and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
262 taxa- Dendrocygna autumnalis4 sites
- Coragyps atratus3 sites
- Odocoileus3 sites
- Phalacrocorax brasilianus3 sites
- Tyto alba3 sites
- Accipitridae2 sites
- Aenocyon dirus2 sites
- Anas bahamensis2 sites
- Aramus guarauna2 sites
- Ardea alba2 sites
- Athene cunicularia2 sites
- Aythya affinis2 sites
- Buteo2 sites
- Calidris minutilla2 sites
- Cathartes aura2 sites
- Charadrius semipalmatus2 sites
- Charadrius vociferus2 sites
- Dendrocygna viduata2 sites
- Eremotherium2 sites
- Falco peregrinus2 sites
- Falco sparverius2 sites
- Gallinula chloropus2 sites
- Geranoaetus melanoleucus2 sites
- Mixotoxodon larensis2 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 6 sites for Cairina moschata, 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
6 references- The diversity and biogeography of late Pleistocene birds from the lowland Neotropics1
- Prehistoric exploitation of birds on the Pacific coast of Chiapas, Mexico1
- An archaeological record for the white-faced whistling-duck (Dendrocygna viduata) in central Panama1
- The non-passerine Pleistocene avifauna of the Talara Tar Seeps, northwestern Peru1
- The muscovy duck in the Pleistocene of Panamá1
- Pre-Columbian bird remains from Venezuela1
Each of the 6 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 Cairina moschata
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 2.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
Photogrammetry
- Source
- MorphoSource
- Credit
- Moore Lab of Zoology
- Licence
- not stated by the source
- Commercial use
- cannot be read from the licence given — check the record
- Specimen
- Cairina moschata · MLZ:Bird:MLZ:Bird:41876
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 itCairina through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Linnaeus 1758)