Gallinago gallinago
The common snipe is a small, stocky wader native to the Old World, where it breeds in marshes, bogs, tundra and wet meadows. It is usually shy and well-camouflaged, foraging in soft mud mainly for insects and earthworms but also some plant material. During courtship, males perform a "winnowing" display; flying high in circles and then taking shallow dives to produce a "drumming" sound by vibrating the tail feathers.

TRinaud · CC BY 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
- common snipePBDB
- Sits inside
- GallinagoPBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB, for Coelurosauria
- Life habit
- ground dwelling, solitaryPBDB, for Theropoda
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
- Environment
- marinePBDB, for Charadriiformes
- Mass
- 111 gWikidata
Time the record covers
At least 1.6 million years on record.
The record covers at least 1.8 Mya to 129 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 2.58 Mya to 11.7 ka.
15 occurrences of Gallinago gallinago 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
15 occurrences- Pleistocene100%
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.
Gallinago gallinago and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Gallinago gallinago and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
631 taxa- Anas platyrhynchos9 sites
- Falco sparverius7 sites
- Anatidae6 sites
- Colaptes auratus6 sites
- Ectopistes migratorius6 sites
- Eremophila alpestris6 sites
- Megascops asio6 sites
- Zenaida macroura6 sites
- Anas crecca5 sites
- Aquila chrysaetos5 sites
- Bubo virginianus5 sites
- Buteo5 sites
- Corvus brachyrhynchos5 sites
- Odocoileus virginianus5 sites
- Passeriformes5 sites
- Podilymbus podiceps5 sites
- Porzana carolina5 sites
- Scalopus aquaticus5 sites
- Tyto alba5 sites
- Accipiter cooperii4 sites
- Aegolius acadicus4 sites
- Botaurus lentiginosus4 sites
- Cardinalis cardinalis4 sites
- Colinus virginianus4 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 15 sites for Gallinago gallinago, 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
10 references- Late Pleistocene fossil birds from Buso Doppio del Broion Cave (North-Eastern Italy): implications for palaeoecology, palaeoenvironment and palaeoclimate3
- Avian community, climate, and sea-level changes in the Plio-Pleistocene of the Florida Peninsula3
- Late Pleistocene birds from Binagada (Azerbaijan) in collection of the National Museum of Natural History (Kyiv, Ukraine)2
- Birds of the Late Pleistocene and Holocene from the Palaeolithic Djuktai cave site of Yakutia, eastern Siberia1
- A catalogue of British Pleistocene birds identified by Colin JO Harrison and stored in the Natural History Museum, London, (Department of Palaeontology)1
- The late Pleistocene (Rancholabrean) avifauna of Little Box Elder Cave, Wyoming1
- Evidence of a Boreal Avifauna in Middle Tennessee during the Late Pleistocene1
- The Clark's Cave bone deposit and the Late Pleistocene paleoecology of the central Appalachian Mountains of Virginia1
- A Pleistocene avifauna from Haile, Florida1
- A comparison of avian assemblages from individual pits at Rancho La Brea, California1
Each of the 15 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 Gallinago gallinago
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- TRinaud
- Licence
- CC BY 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Gallinago gallinago 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
- 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 itGallinago through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Linnaeus 1758)