Tringa melanoleuca
The greater yellowlegs is a large shorebird in the family Scolopacidae. It breeds in central Canada and southern Alaska and winters in southern North America, Central America, the West Indies and South America.

Chuck Homler, Focus On Wildlife · 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
- greater yellowlegsPBDB
- Sits inside
- TringaPBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB, for Coelurosauria
- Life habit
- ground dwelling, solitaryPBDB, for Theropoda
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
- Environment
- marinePBDB, for Charadriiformes
- Mass
- 27.9 gWikidata
Time the record covers
At most 210 thousand years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 210 ka and 0 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
9 occurrences of Tringa melanoleuca 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
9 occurrences- Pleistocene99%
- Holocene1%
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
1 formation
Loading coastlines…
The named rock units Tringa melanoleuca has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 8 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Tringa melanoleuca and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Tringa melanoleuca and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
553 taxa- Falco peregrinus7 sites
- Athene cunicularia6 sites
- Charadrius vociferus6 sites
- Falco sparverius6 sites
- Podilymbus podiceps6 sites
- Tyto alba6 sites
- Bubo virginianus5 sites
- Buteo5 sites
- Spatula clypeata5 sites
- Aenocyon dirus4 sites
- Anas crecca carolinensis4 sites
- Anas platyrhynchos4 sites
- Aquila chrysaetos4 sites
- Branta canadensis4 sites
- Caracara cheriway4 sites
- Cathartes aura4 sites
- Corvus brachyrhynchos4 sites
- Megascops asio4 sites
- Numenius americanus4 sites
- Phalaropus lobatus4 sites
- Tringa solitaria4 sites
- Zenaida macroura4 sites
- Accipiter cooperii3 sites
- Anas acuta3 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 9 sites for Tringa melanoleuca, 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
9 references- The diversity and biogeography of late Pleistocene birds from the lowland Neotropics1
- The late Pleistocene avifauna of Crystal Ball Cave, Utah1
- The non-passerine Pleistocene avifauna of the Talara Tar Seeps, northwestern Peru1
- The late Pleistocene avifauna of La Carolina, southwestern Ecuador1
- A Pleistocene avifauna from Haile, Florida1
- A comparison of avian assemblages from individual pits at Rancho La Brea, California1
- The Pleistocene avifauna of Arredondo, Florida1
- A review of the Pleistocene birds of Fossil Lake, Oregon1
- The fossil Birds of California1
Each of the 9 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 Tringa melanoleuca
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Chuck Homler, Focus On Wildlife
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Tringa melanoleuca was found in Smithsonian Open Access and Sketchfab.
MorphoSource 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 itTringa through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Gmelin 1789)