Pagophila eburnea
The ivory gull is a small gull, the only species in the genus Pagophila. It is a resident breeding bird in the high Arctic and has a circumpolar distribution through Greenland, northernmost North America, and Eurasia.

Samuel Etienne · CC BY-SA 3.0 · 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
- ivory gullPBDB
- Sits inside
- PagophilaPBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB, for Coelurosauria
- Life habit
- ground dwelling, solitaryPBDB, for Theropoda
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
- Environment
- marinePBDB, for Charadriiformes
- Mass
- 617 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.
3 occurrences of Pagophila eburnea on record, most of them in the Holocene. 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
3 occurrences- Pleistocene33%
- Holocene67%
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.
Pagophila eburnea and its relatives
HoloceneWhere Pagophila eburnea and its relatives were recorded in the Holocene.
Found in the same rock
36 taxa- Calidris canutus2 sites
- Lagopus muta2 sites
- Ovibos moschatus2 sites
- Rangifer tarandus2 sites
- Rissa tridactyla2 sites
- Salvelinus2 sites
- Vulpes lagopus2 sites
- Alle alle1 site
- Anarhichas1 site
- Anatidae1 site
- Branta1 site
- Branta bernicla1 site
- Branta leucopsis1 site
- Brosme1 site
- Canis lupus1 site
- Cepphus grylle1 site
- Clangula hyemalis1 site
- Fratercula arctica1 site
- Fulmarus glacialis1 site
- Gadus1 site
- Larus hyperboreus1 site
- Lemmus lemmus1 site
- Lepus arcticus1 site
- Lutra lutra1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 3 sites for Pagophila eburnea, 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
3 references- The Northernmost Ruins of the Globe1
- Seabirds and Late Pleistocene marine environments in the Northeast Atlantic and the Mediterranean1
- Quaternary geology and biology of the Jorgen Bronlund Fjord area, North Greenland1
Each of the 3 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 Pagophila eburnea
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Samuel Etienne
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Pagophila eburnea 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, “Ivory gull”
- 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 itPagophila through timeFormations of the HoloceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Phipps 1774)