Calidris pugnax
The ruff is a medium-sized wading bird that breeds in marshes and wet meadows across northern Eurasia. This highly gregarious sandpiper is migratory and sometimes forms huge flocks in its winter grounds, which include southern and western Europe, Africa, southern Asia and Australia.

Arjan Haverkamp · CC BY 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
- ruffPBDB
- Sits inside
- CalidrisPBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB, for Coelurosauria
- Life habit
- ground dwelling, solitaryPBDB, for Theropoda
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
- Environment
- marinePBDB, for Charadriiformes
- Mass
- 102 gWikidata
Time the record covers
At least 762 thousand years on record.
The record covers at least 774 ka to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 1.8 Mya to 0 Mya.
7 occurrences of Calidris pugnax 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
7 occurrences- Pleistocene84%
- Holocene16%
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.
Calidris pugnax and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Calidris pugnax and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
126 taxa- Anas3 sites
- Anatidae3 sites
- Aythya3 sites
- Falco peregrinus3 sites
- Larus canus3 sites
- Accipitridae2 sites
- Alauda arvensis2 sites
- Alectoris2 sites
- Anas platyrhynchos2 sites
- Anser2 sites
- Anser albifrons2 sites
- Athene noctua2 sites
- Calandrella2 sites
- Charadriiformes2 sites
- Columba livia2 sites
- Corvus corone2 sites
- Corvus pliocaenus2 sites
- Falco subbuteo2 sites
- Fringillidae2 sites
- Galerida2 sites
- Garrulus glandarius2 sites
- Haliaeetus albicilla2 sites
- Melanocorypha calandra2 sites
- Numenius2 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 6 sites for Calidris pugnax, 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
5 references- Late Pleistocene birds from Binagada (Azerbaijan) in collection of the National Museum of Natural History (Kyiv, Ukraine)2
- Early Pleistocene birds from Pirro Nord (Puglia, southern Italy)2
- Exploitation of a seasonal resource: bird hunting during the late Natufian at Shubayqa 11
- Birds of the Late Pleistocene and Holocene from the Palaeolithic Djuktai cave site of Yakutia, eastern Siberia1
- Bird bones from Jettböle I, a site in the Neolithic Åland archipelago in the northern Baltic1
Each of the 7 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 Calidris pugnax
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Arjan Haverkamp
- Licence
- CC BY 2.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Calidris pugnax 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, “Ruff (bird)”
- 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 itCalidris through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Linnaeus 1758)