Ciconia - Species

Species

  • Abdim's Stork, Ciconia abdimii
  • Woolly-necked Stork, Ciconia episcopus
  • Storm's Stork, Ciconia stormi
  • Maguari Stork, Ciconia maguari
  • Oriental White Stork, Ciconia boyciana
  • White Stork, Ciconia ciconia
  • Black Stork, Ciconia nigra

The fossil record of the genus is extensive, indicating that Ciconia storks were once more widespread than they are today. Although the known material tends to suggest that the genus evolved around the Atlantic, possibly in western Europe or Africa, the comparative lack of fossil sites in Asia makes this assumption not well-founded presently. All that can be said is that by the Early Pliocene, Ciconia was widespread at least all over the Northern Hemisphere.

Fossil members of the genus include:

  • ?Ciconia minor (Early Miocene of Rusinga Island, Kenya)
  • ?Ciconia sarmantica (Late Miocene of Credinţa, Romania)
  • ?Ciconia gaudryi (Late Miocene/Early Pliocene of Pikermi, Greece)
  • Ciconia sp. 1 (Late Miocene/Early Pliocene of Lee Creek Mine, USA)
  • Ciconia sp. 2 (Late Miocene/Early Pliocene of Lee Creek Mine, USA)
  • ?Ciconia kahli (Early Pliocene of South Africa)
  • Mongolian Stork, Ciconia lucida (Middle Pliocene of Mongolia)
  • Asphalt Stork, Ciconia maltha (Late Pliocene - Late Pleistocene of W and S USA, and Cuba)
  • Ciconia stehlini (Late Pliocene - Early Pleistocene of Hungary) - may belong to extant species
  • Australian Stork, Ciconia nana (Late Pleistocene of Australia) - formerly Xenorhynchus
  • Ciconia sp. (Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene of Las Breas de San Felipe, Cuba)

A distal radius in Late Pleistocene deposits of San Josecito Cavern (Mexico) may belong in this genus or in Mycteria; it is smaller than that of any known American stork, Ciconia or otherwise. The proposed fossil genus Prociconia from Brazil, also of Late Pleistocene age, may be a junior synonym of either this genus or Jabiru. A Ciconia bone found in a rock shelter on Réunion was probably of a bird taken there as food by early settlers; no known account mentions the presence of storks on the Mascarenes.

Read more about this topic:  Ciconia

Famous quotes containing the word species:

    “Books, gentlemen, are a species of men, and introduced to them you circulate in the “very best society” that this world can furnish, without the intolerable infliction of “dressing” to go into it. In your shabbiest coat and cosiest slippers you may socially chat even with the fastidious Earl of Chesterfield, and lounging under a tree enjoy the divinest intimacy with my late lord of Verulam.”
    —Herman Melville (1819–1891)

    “Both classically- and romantically-minded spirits—inasmuch as these two species always exist—occupy themselves with a vision of the future: but the former do so out of a strength of their age, the latter out of its weakness.”
    —Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

    “If there is a species which is more maltreated than children, then it must be their toys, which they handle in an incredibly off-hand manner.... Toys are thus the end point in that long chain in which all the conditions of despotic high-handedness are in play which enchain beings one to another, from one species to another—cruel divinities to their sacrificial victims, from masters to slaves, from adults to children, and from children to their objects.”
    —Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)