Tadorna ferruginea
The ruddy shelduck is a bird species in the family Anatidae. It is a distinctive waterfowl, 58 to 70 cm in length with a wingspan of 110 to 135 cm. It has orange-brown body plumage with a paler head, while the tail and the flight feathers in the wings are black, contrasting with the white wing-coverts. It is a migratory bird, wintering in the Indian subcontinent and breeding in southeastern Europe and central Asia, though there are small resident populations in North Africa. It has a loud honking call.

Original: Rohit Sharma , this edit: MPF · 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
- Ruddy shelduckPBDB
- Sits inside
- TadornaPBDB
- Diet
- herbivorePBDB, for Anseriformes
- Life habit
- volantPBDB, for Anseriformes
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Theropoda
- Mass
- 1.36 kgWikidata
Time the record covers
At least 645 thousand years on record.
The record covers at least 774 ka to 129 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 2.58 Mya to 11.7 ka.
8 occurrences of Tadorna ferruginea 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
8 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.
Found in
2 formations
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The named rock units Tadorna ferruginea has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 6 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Tadorna ferruginea and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Tadorna ferruginea and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
149 taxa- Anas crecca5 sites
- Anas platyrhynchos4 sites
- Anser albifrons4 sites
- Mareca penelope4 sites
- Turdus merula4 sites
- Alauda arvensis3 sites
- Alcelaphus buselaphus3 sites
- Anas3 sites
- Anas acuta3 sites
- Anser fabalis3 sites
- Ardea cinerea3 sites
- Aythya ferina3 sites
- Bos primigenius3 sites
- Columba livia3 sites
- Hippopotamus amphibius3 sites
- Mergus merganser3 sites
- Pica pica3 sites
- Pyrrhocorax graculus3 sites
- Trionyx triunguis3 sites
- Alectoris2 sites
- Asio flammeus2 sites
- Athene noctua2 sites
- Branta bernicla2 sites
- Bubo bubo2 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 8 sites for Tadorna ferruginea, 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
6 references- Early Pleistocene birds from Pirro Nord (Puglia, southern Italy)2
- Kom Ombo: Preliminary Report on the Fauna of Late Paleolithic Sites in Upper Egypt2
- Pleistocene birds of Gruta da Furninha (Peniche-Portugal): a paleontological and paleoenvironmental aproach1
- Pleistocene and prehistoric birds of south-west Britain1
- Relationships of the Late Pleistocene Vertebrate Fauna from Kom Ombo, Upper Egypt1
- Ust'-Kanskaya peshchernaya paleoliticheskaya stoyanka1
Each of the 8 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 Tadorna ferruginea
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Original: Rohit Sharma , this edit: MPF
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Tadorna ferruginea 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 itTadorna through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Pallas 1764)