Toxostoma rufum
The brown thrasher, sometimes erroneously called the brown thrush or fox-coloured thrush, is a bird in the family Mimidae, which also includes the New World catbirds and mockingbirds. The brown thrasher is abundant throughout the eastern and central United States and southern and central Canada, and it is the only thrasher to live primarily east of the Rockies and central Texas. It is the state bird of Georgia.

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- Also called
- brown thrasherPBDB
- Sits inside
- ToxostomaPBDB
- Diet
- insectivorePBDB, for Mimidae
- Life habit
- volantPBDB, for Mimidae
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Mimidae
Time the record covers
At least 81 thousand years on record.
The record covers at least 210 ka to 129 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 1.4 Mya to 11.7 ka.
4 occurrences of Toxostoma rufum 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
4 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.
Toxostoma rufum and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Toxostoma rufum and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
369 taxa- Odocoileus virginianus4 sites
- Scalopus aquaticus4 sites
- Buteo platypterus3 sites
- Colaptes auratus3 sites
- Colinus virginianus3 sites
- Cryptotis parva3 sites
- Ectopistes migratorius3 sites
- Gallinago gallinago3 sites
- Megascops asio3 sites
- Melanerpes erythrocephalus3 sites
- Mephitis mephitis3 sites
- Microtus pinetorum3 sites
- Neotoma floridana3 sites
- Perimyotis subflavus3 sites
- Scolopax minor3 sites
- Spatula discors3 sites
- Accipiter striatus2 sites
- Actitis macularius2 sites
- Agelaius phoeniceus2 sites
- Amblystoma2 sites
- Anas platyrhynchos2 sites
- Anguispira alternata2 sites
- Asio flammeus2 sites
- Blarina brevicauda2 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 4 sites for Toxostoma rufum, 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
4 references- Avian community, climate, and sea-level changes in the Plio-Pleistocene of the Florida Peninsula1
- The Clark's Cave bone deposit and the Late Pleistocene paleoecology of the central Appalachian Mountains of Virginia1
- A Pleistocene avifauna from Haile, Florida1
- Notes on fossil and subfossil birds1
Each of the 4 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 content2
Picture of Toxostoma rufum
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Rhododendrites
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
CT scan
- Source
- MorphoSource
- Licence
- In Copyright
- Commercial use
- cannot be read from the licence given — check the record
- Specimen
- Toxostoma rufum · UF:Birds:52581
Smithsonian Open Access was 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 itToxostoma through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Linnaeus 1758)