Three bird taxa (Aves: Anatidae, Phasianidae, Scolopacidae) from the Late Miocene of the Sea of Azov (Southwestern Russia)

Abstract

European Late Miocene avian faunas are very insufficiently known. Until now, no Mio-Pliocene birds have been described from the eastern part of the Eastern Paratethys, and the entire record of birds from the Eastern Paratethys is restricted to several poorly described taxa from Ukraine and Moldova. Here we describe the remains of three bird species from the recently discovered Late Miocene vertebrate locality Morskaya-2, which has yielded the first known avian fauna of this age in the European part of Russia and also the easternmost Neogene avian fauna in Europe. The three taxa represent the families Phasianidae, Anatidae and Scolopacidae, which have not been documented from the Miocene of the Eastern Paratethys before. A small quail from Morskaya is assigned to Plioperdix hungarica comb. nov., which was previously known from the Late Miocene of Hungary. We show that the morphology of the acrocoracoid process of the coracoid is very diagnostic in phasianids and fits the molecular phylogeny of the family relatively well. Apomorphic characters indicate that Plioperdix is a sister taxon of the extant genus Coturnix. A medium-sized duck is assigned to the genus Anas s.s. and described as a new species, A. kurochkini sp. nov. Although metrically close to S. clypeata, this duck is morphologically distinct from all extant dabbling ducks. The presence of the quail and the duck indicates a certain degree of similarity between the avian faunas across the northern borders of the Central and Eastern Paratethys in the latest Miocene. The third reported taxon is a large snipe, which is described here as Gallinago azovica sp. nov.