Distribution
Bones of the species have been excavated at two islands in the Caribbean, Saint Croix and Puerto Rico. The location at Saint Croix is a pre-Columbian Amerindian village site near the current town of Concordia, near the Southwest Cape. The bones from Puerto Rico were excavated from an inland village of the Saladoid Indians that was located at the eastern bank of the Río Bucaná, north-east of the current city of Ponce. A possible third location is Montserrat, where a nearly complete coracoid was excavated (UF 4416). The bone of this specimen is slightly smaller than the bone of the Puerto Rico specimen, and could therefore be within the range of the Cuban Red Macaw (Ara tricolor); it has not been assigned to either species.
Although the species had only been found in St. Croix and Puerto Rico, in both cases it was recovered from Amerindian village sites. Williams and Steadman consider it possible that the species may have been native to St. Croix, but Olson and Máiz López regard this as unlikely, noting that parrots, important to the indigenous people, were likely to have been transported between islands. This makes it difficult to determine the natural geographical origins of the parrots known only from subfossil remains found in the West Indian region.
Read more about this topic: Saint Croix Macaw
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