Egretta thula

The snowy egret is a small white heron. The genus name comes from Provençal French for the little egret, aigrette, which is a diminutive of aigron, 'heron'. The species name thula is the Mapudungun term for the black-necked swan, applied to this species in error by Chilean naturalist Juan Ignacio Molina in 1782.

Egretta thula

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
snowy egretPBDB
Sits inside
EgrettaPBDB
Diet
piscivorePBDB, for Ardeidae
Life habit
volantPBDB, for Ardeidae
Motility
actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
Environment
terrestrialPBDB, for Ardeidae

Time the record covers

At most 118 thousand years on record.

Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 129 ka and 11.7 ka, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.

Pleistocene — about 4 of 4 occurrencesPleistoceneHolocene — about 0 of 4 occurrences147 ka–126 ka Mya — about 0.1 occurrences126 ka–105 ka Mya — about 0.7 occurrences105 ka–84 ka Mya — about 0.7 occurrences84 ka–63 ka Mya — about 0.7 occurrences63 ka–42 ka Mya — about 0.7 occurrences42 ka–21 ka Mya — about 0.7 occurrences21 ka–0 Mya — about 0.3 occurrences629 ka0 Mya

4 occurrences of Egretta thula 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

4 occurrences

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.

Egretta thula and its relatives

Pleistocene

Where Egretta thula and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.

Found in the same rock

294 taxa

The Paleobiology Database records 4 sites for Egretta thula, 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

4 references

Each of the 4 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 content2

Picture of Egretta thula

Credit
Chuck Homler d/b/a Focus On Wildlife
Licence
CC BY-SA 4.0
Commercial use
the licence allows it

3D model

Source
Sketchfab
Credit
dgred
Licence
CC Attribution
Commercial use
cannot be read from the licence given — check the record

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

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 itEgretta through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on

Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Molina 1782)