Scolopax
The woodcocks are a group of eight very similar living species of sandpipers in the genus Scolopax. The genus name is Latin for a snipe or woodcock, and until around 1800 was used to refer to a variety of waders. The English name is first recorded in about 1050. According to the Harleian Miscellany, a group of woodcocks is called a "fall".

Rhododendrites · 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- Sits inside
- ScolopacidaePBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB, for Coelurosauria
- Life habit
- ground dwelling, solitaryPBDB, for Theropoda
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
- Environment
- marinePBDB, for Charadriiformes
Time the record covers
At least 5.3 million years on record.
The record covers at least 5.333 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 11.63 Mya to 0 Mya.
43 occurrences of Scolopax 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
43 occurrences- Miocene2%
- Pliocene1%
- Pleistocene84%
- Holocene12%
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.
Found in
2 formations
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The named rock units Scolopax has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 41 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Scolopax and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Scolopax and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
880 taxa- Turdus16 sites
- Tyto alba15 sites
- Columba palumbus12 sites
- Columba11 sites
- Corvus monedula11 sites
- Colaptes auratus10 sites
- Colinus virginianus10 sites
- Corvus10 sites
- Pica pica10 sites
- Pyrrhocorax graculus10 sites
- Anas platyrhynchos9 sites
- Anatidae9 sites
- Athene cretensis9 sites
- Buteo buteo8 sites
- Columba oenas8 sites
- Ectopistes migratorius8 sites
- Falco tinnunculus8 sites
- Garrulus glandarius8 sites
- Megascops asio8 sites
- Odocoileus virginianus8 sites
- Podilymbus podiceps8 sites
- Rana8 sites
- Scalopus aquaticus8 sites
- Accipiter gentilis7 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 42 sites for Scolopax, 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
26 references- The Quaternary avifauna of Crete, Greece10
- The Late Pleistocene fossil birds of the central and southern Ryukyu Islands, and their zoogeographical implications for the Recent avifauna of the archipelago4
- Avian community, climate, and sea-level changes in the Plio-Pleistocene of the Florida Peninsula4
- A catalogue of British Pleistocene birds identified by Colin JO Harrison and stored in the Natural History Museum, London, (Department of Palaeontology)2
- Birds in Finnish prehistory2
- Birds around the Minatogawa Man: the Late Pleistocene avian fossil assemblage of the Minatogawa Fissure, southern part of Okinawa Island, Central Ryukyu Islands, Japan1
- A new Middle Pleistocene bird assemblage from Cava di Breccia di Casal Selce (Ponte Galeria, Rome, Italy)1
- Early Pleistocene birds from Pirro Nord (Puglia, southern Italy)1
- The fossil bird associations from the early Middle Pleistocene of the Ragusa province (SE Sicily, Italy)1
- A late-Holocene bird community from Hispaniola: Refining the chronology of vertebrate extinction in the West Indies1
- Birds of the Late Pleistocene and Holocene from the Palaeolithic Djuktai cave site of Yakutia, eastern Siberia1
- Late Pleistocene birds from Kingston Saltpeter Cave, southern Appalachian Mountains, Georgia1
Each of the 43 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. 14 further references are not listed. 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 Scolopax
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Rhododendrites
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
3D model
- Source
- Sketchfab
- 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
- Source
- Wikipedia, “Woodcock”
- 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 itScolopacidae through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Linnaeus 1758