Triassic greenfinch
| Triassic greenfinch | ||||||||||||
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Skull of the Triassic Greenfinch |
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Chloris triasi | ||||||||||||
| ( Alcover & Florit , 1987) |
The Triassic greenfinch ( Chloris triasi , Syn .: Carduelis triasi ) is an extinct songbird from the finch family (Fringillidae). The fossil remains come from the Cuevas de los Murciélagos near San Andrés y Sauces in the north of the island of La Palma , Canary Islands . The art epithet honors the Spanish paleontologist Miquel Trias , who, together with Josep Antoni Alcover, collected the type specimen in July 1985 .
features
The holotype is an almost complete skull with both wing bones but the lower jaw , os quadratum and palatal process missing . The paratypes include the proximal fragment of a right humerus , the distal fragment of a right humerus with a protruding, splintered articular cartilage, a left ulna without an epiphyseal plate , an almost complete right ulna with no elbow cusp, and a complete left carpometacarpus . The skull length is 34.89 mm, the skull width 17.47 mm and the skull height 14.31 mm. The upper jaw length is 19.10 mm, the upper jaw width 9.67 and the upper jaw height 6.71 mm. The distance between the eye sockets is 6.11 mm. The length of the carpometacarpus is 11.69 mm.
The Triassic greenfinch was closely related to the greenfinch ( Chloris chloris ). However, its head was larger and wider and its beak about 30 percent longer. Its legs were very long and robust, but compared to the greenfinch, its wings were shorter. This could have been an adaptation to a ground-dwelling way of life in the laurel forests.
Way of life
The large beak suggests that large seeds were among its main food. Flying was probably impaired by the shortened wings, which was not necessary due to the lack of predators on La Palma.
die out
The fossil material comes from layers that are dated to the Young Pleistocene . The species probably survived until the Holocene , when the Canary Islands were populated and rats and cats became native to La Palma.
literature
- Josep Antoni Alcover, F. Florit: Una nueva especie de Carduelis (Fringillidae) de La Palma. In: Vieraea. Volume 17, 1987, pp. 75-86.
- Julian Pender Hume, Michael Walters: Extinct Birds. A & C Black, London 2012, ISBN 140815725X , p. 316.