Sarkidiornis melanotos
The knob-billed duck or African comb duck is a type of duck found along the tropical/sub-tropical wetlands and waterways of Sub-Saharan Africa and the island of Madagascar, as well as most of South Asia and mainland Indochina.

Charles J. Sharp · 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
- comb duckPBDB
- Sits inside
- SarkidiornisPBDB
- Diet
- herbivorePBDB, for Anatinae
- Life habit
- volantPBDB, for Anatinae
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
- Environment
- freshwaterPBDB, for Anatinae
- Mass
- 66 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 Sarkidiornis melanotos 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
3 occurrences- Pleistocene94%
- Holocene6%
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.
Sarkidiornis melanotos and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Sarkidiornis melanotos and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
130 taxa- Aepyornis2 sites
- Anas bernieri2 sites
- Anas melleri2 sites
- Gallinula chloropus2 sites
- Mullerornis2 sites
- Accipitridae1 site
- Aenocyon dirus1 site
- Alopochen sirabensis1 site
- Anas bahamensis1 site
- Anas erythrorhyncha1 site
- Anura1 site
- Aquila1 site
- Aramides cajaneus1 site
- Aramus guarauna1 site
- Ardeidae1 site
- Arundinicola leucocephala1 site
- Asio stygius1 site
- Athene cunicularia1 site
- Bubo1 site
- Burhinus1 site
- Buteo1 site
- Buteo brachypterus1 site
- Buteogallus1 site
- Buteogallus aequinoctialis1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 3 sites for Sarkidiornis melanotos, 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
2 references- Holocene bird subfossils from the sites of Ampasambazimba, Antsirabe and Ampoza, Madagascar: changes in the avifauna of south central Madagascar over the past few millennia2
- The diversity and biogeography of late Pleistocene birds from the lowland Neotropics1
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 Sarkidiornis melanotos
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Charles J. Sharp
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Sarkidiornis melanotos 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 itSarkidiornis through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Pennant 1769)