Coua primaeva is an extinct species of the genus coua . The holotype, a tarsometatarsus, was found in the Tsiandroina fossil site in Madagascar and described by Alphonse Milne-Edwards and Alfred Grandidier in1895. The bone, which is kept in the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle , has a length of 84 mm and is larger, slimmer and more delicate than the tarsometatarsi of the also extinct Delalande silk cuckoo (length 70 mm) and the more recent giant silk cuckoo (length 69 mm) but smaller than the tarsometatarsus of Coua berthae (length 93 mm), an extinct silky cuckoo species that was only described in 1993. According to the measurement with the C-14 method, the bone has an age of 1980 ± 150 years. However, the species may have survived until 1000 or 600 years ago.
literature
Robert B. Payne: The Cuckoos. Bird Families of the World. Volume 15 , Oxford University Press, 2005 ISBN 0-19-850213-3
Kálmán Lambrecht : Handbook of Palaeornithology , Gebrüder Borntraeger, Berlin. 1933 (reprinted 1964)
Ross DE MacPhee: Extinctions in Near Time: Causes, Contexts, and Consequences. Kluwer Academic / Plenum Publishers, 1999, ISBN 0306460920 .
Steven M. Goodman & Lucien Rakotozafy: Subfossil birds from coastal sites in western and southwestern Madagascar: A paleoenvironmental reconstruction. In: Steven M. Goodman: Natural Change and Human Impact in Madagascar. Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 1997: pp. 257-279
