#chendytes

[katborg82]

It's a little late in the day but here's Chendytes for fossil Novembirb day 17!

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Chendytes lawi

By Ripley Cook

Etymology: Goose Diver

First Described By: Miller, 1925

Classification: Dinosauromorpha, Dinosauriformes, Dracohors, Dinosauria, Saurischia, Eusaurischia, Theropoda, Neotheropoda, Averostra, Tetanurae, Orionides, Avetheropoda, Coelurosauria, Tyrannoraptora, Maniraptoriformes, Maniraptora, Pennaraptora, Paraves, Eumaniraptora, Averaptora, Avialae, Euavialae, Avebrevicauda, Pygostylia, Ornithothoraces, Euornithes, Ornithuromorpha, Ornithurae, Neornithes, Neognathae, Galloanserae, Anseriformes, Anseres, Anatoidea, Anatidae, Anatinae

Status: Extinct

Time and Place: Between 126,000 and 250 BCE, from the Tarantian of the Pleistocene through the Holocene 

Chendytes is known from a variety of locations along the west coast of North America - the Palos Verdes Sand Formation, the San Pedro Sand Formation, the San Miguel Island deposits, the Daisy Cave deposits, and the Port Orford Formation, among others. 

Physical Description: Chendytes was a fascinating and odd duck, about the size of living swans - so approximately 1.5 meters long in terms of its body size. They were shaped almost identically to the Hesperornithines of old - with streamlined bodies for diving and short legs for propelling their swimming, they also had small wings that were essentially useless for any activity. As such, like the dead Hesperornithines and the living grebes, it was extremely well adapted for diving, which is precisely what they spent their lives doing. Chendytes had a long neck, like modern geese, and a fairly stout body - also like living geese. It differed from living geese in having stronger legs for diving, and almost no wings at all.

Diet: Chendytes would have mainly eaten fish and other aquatic organisms as it dived through the sea. 

By Apokryltaros, CC BY 2.5

Behavior: Chendytes probably spent most of its time diving and swimming through the water, in search of sources of food. It would have rarely gone on land, being ill-suited to walking, but instead done most of its business in the ocean. It would have propelled itself fast in pursuit of prey, as well as to escape predators such as sharks, whales, and even large ray-finned fish. It probably migrated to nest - with large concentrations of eggs known from the Channel Islands of California, it even seems probable that these ducks would have migrated all the way there to breed, like many other aquatic birds do today. They probably lived in very large flocks, diving and swimming about together like living penguins. 

Ecosystem: The coast of North America was very similar in the past to today, but with more dramatic climate movements given the fluctuations of the Ice Age, and a different cast of living creature characters. There were giant, Sabretooth Salmon; robust and terrifying carnivorous mammals like Sabretooth Cats and Dire Coyotes; mammoths and mastodons; and a variety of interesting dinosaurs such as giant Condors, tiny Dow’s Puffins, and the bulky Californian Turkey. In short, the coast of California during the time of Chendytes would have resembled today, while still being very odd and foreign - filled with a variety of megafauna, both dinosaur and not. 

By Scott Reid

Other: Interestingly enough, even though Chendytes was adapted so thoroughly for diving, it is more closely related to the dabbling ducks than to the diving ducks - indicating it was a strange evolutionary offshoot of the dabbling duck group, adapting to the rapidly changing conditions of the late Quaternary Ice Age. It probably went extinct due to a mixture of habitat loss and human hunting, as people became more common along the coast - there is an extensive record of it being hunted and exploited by humans for at least 8,000 years, one of the longest such records known. .

~ By Meig Dickson

Sources under the Cut 

Buckner, J. C., R. Ellingson, D. A. Gold, T. L. Jones, D. K. Jacobs. 2018. Mitogenomics supports an unexpected taxonomic relationship for the extinct diving duck Chendytes lawi and definitively places the extinct Labrador Duck. Molecular Phylogenetics Evolution 122: 102 - 109.

Jones, T. L., J. F. Porcasi, J. M. Erlandson, H. Dallas Jr., T. A. Wake, R. Schwaderer. 2008. The protracted Holocene extinction of California’s flightless sea duck (Chendytes lawi) and its implications for the Pleistocene overkill hypothesis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 105 (11): 4105 - 4108.

Miller, L. 1925. Chendytes, a diving goose from the California Pleistocene. Condor 27:145-147.

Jobling, J. A. 2010. The Helm Dictionary of Scientific Bird Names. Christopher Helm Publishing, A&C Black Publishers Ltd, London.

[longhorned]

maybe the best image on all of Wikipedia is this illustration for Chendytes

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Chendytes lawi

By Scott Reid on @drawingwithdinosaurs

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Name: Chendytes lawi

Status: Extinct

First Described: 1925

Described By: Miller

Classification: Dinosauria, Saurischia, Eusaurischia, Theropoda, Neotheropoda, Averostra, Tetanurae, Orionides, Avetheropoda, Coelurosauria, Tyrannoraptora, Maniraptoriformes, Maniraptora, Pennaraptora, Paraves, Eumaniraptora, Averaptora, Avialae, Euavialae, Avebrevicauda, Pygostylia, Ornithothoraces, Euornithes, Ornithuromorpha, Ornithurae, Neornithes, Neognathae, Galloanserae, Anseriformes, Anseres, Anatoidea, Anatidae, Anatinae 

Chendytes is an utterly fascinating and often overlooked species of extinct duck, which is odd, because you’d think people would be interested in a duck 

A) the size of a swan  B) Was flightless and essentially a Hesperornithine/Penguin Duck  C) Was driven to extinction due to human hunting 

But here you go. Chendytes is known primarily from the Latest Pleistocene, so around 200,000 years ago in the Chibanian, until the year 250 BCE or so. Its fossils are actually found in ancient Native American archaeological sites form that time and older, pointing to human utilization of this bird as a major part of their lifestyle. These birds were large diving ducks, living on the coast of Western North America (primarily California and Oregon), and given that it lived during the last ice period and today, it was clearly adapted for frigid environments. It was very very common, and probably nested on the Channel Islands of California. 

By Apokryltaros, CC BY 2.5

It resembled living sea ducks immensely, though with larger body size, slightly longer necks, and smaller wings that weren’t being used for flying at all - indeed, it almost looks like a Hesperornithine, except not, and from the recent past. Interestingly enough, despite resembling diving and sea ducks, it is probably the sister taxa of the dabbling ducks - a weird evolutionary experiment for that group. Despite being driven to extinction by human activity, it actually took more than 8,000 years for humans to hunt this bird to extinction - an interesting proposition, since usually human presence drives species to extinction very rapidly, and as such it poses a remarkable model system for studying current environmental crises. 

Buy the author a coffee: http://ko-fi.com/kulindadromeus

Sources: 

http://bwfov.typepad.com/birders_world_field_of_vi/2008/03/californias-for.html 

http://fossilworks.org/bridge.pl?a=taxonInfo&taxon_no=142717 

Buckner, J. C., R. Ellingson, D. A. Gold, T. L. Jones, D. K. Jacobs. 2018. Mitogenomics supports an unexpected taxonomic relationship for the extinct diving duck Chendytes lawi and definitively places the extinct Labrador Duck. Molecular Phylogenetics Evolution 122: 102 - 109. 

Jones, T. L., J. F. Porcasi, J. M. Erlandson, H. Dallas Jr., T. A. Wake, R. Schwaderer. 2008. The protracted Holocene extinction of California’s flightless sea duck (Chendytes lawi) and its implications for the Pleistocene overkill hypothesis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 105 (11): 4105 - 4108.