200,000-Year-Old Woodpecker Fossil Unearthed in Argentina During Excavation, Could Fill Gaps in Evolutionary Record

The remains of an ancient woodpecker had been unearthed in Argentina. Scientists were shocked by the discovery because it was nearly complete.

Woodpecker Fossil Unearthed in Argentina

Paleontologists were taken aback by the woodpecker fossil's extraordinary level of preservation when it was discovered in a stone quarry in San Pedro, about 100 miles north of Buenos Aires. It is considered to be over 200,000 years old, Newsweek reported.

As there is a gap in existing fossil material, it is hoped that the discovery will fill in any gaps in the woodpecker's evolutionary history. Today, many woodpecker species are regarded as threatened or endangered.

This discovery adds a special specimen to our understanding of this group of birds, which pleased those who discovered it, according to José Luis Aguilar, the museum's director, who announced the discovery in a Facebook post translated by the Museo Paleontológico de San Pedro. According to Aguilar, the skull and limbs will reveal data that will fill in the existing gaps in the fossil record of these birds.

Aguilar and Silvina Carro from the museum discovered the woodpecker fossil while excavating. They then cut out the stone containing the bones to return to the museum. According to the museum, some stone strata in the same quarry where the fossil was discovered go back up to a million years.

The fossil was discovered to be in good shape, with the skeleton being almost complete on the left side of the woodpecker's body after cutting the bones from the sediment and cleaning the specimen.

The specimen is in astounding condition considering its age. A thin slime that eventually crystallized into granite kept its fragile parts.

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Woodpecker Believed to Be From Picidae Family

The bird is thought to belong to the Picidae family. According to Britannica, Picidae, a family of birds in the order, Piciformes, comprises wrynecks, piculets, and woodpeckers. Except for Madagascar and the areas east of Borneo and Bali, all 210 species are found throughout the planet.

Most are trained to extract insects from tree bark by digging holes with their bills. Some also consume nuts, fruits, and sap; a small number collect ants and grubs from the ground.

Afrotropical (Africa and the Middle East), Eastern (Indomalaysia), Neotropical (South America and part of Central America), and Holarctic (North America and Eurasia) regions, except for Australia, Madagascar, and Poles, also belong to the family Picidae. According to Jorge Noriega, one of Argentina's most well-known fossil bird researchers, they are commonly known as woodpeckers and include 28 genera and about 216 species worldwide.

About 20 of these species are in danger of going extinct, with the imperial woodpecker being considered extinct in the wild and the ivory-billed woodpecker in the United States being listed as severely endangered.

Woodpecker fossils are scarce and only exist as fragmentary material, mostly in the form of skeletal fragments. The South American paleontological registry is significantly worse, and most mentions are limited to extant organisms from Brazil's, Argentina's, and Uruguay's Quaternary. The exception is Colaptes naroskyi, an extinct species that Agnolin and Jofré described for the Late Pleistocene in the northeast of Buenos Aires province.

The recently discovered specimen will be displayed in the Museo Paleontológico de San Pedro in the coming weeks.