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Cuban Macaw Ara tricolor in the Upper Pleistocene of Western Cuba

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Abstract

The Cuban macaw Ara tricolor (Bechstein, 1811) is an extinct species of large parrots. Its historical distribution and ecology are poorly understood. To date, only three late Quaternary paleontological and one archeozoological (17th–18th centuries) finds of the species have been described from central Cuba. A new (fourth) fossil find of the Cuban macaw is described and is a fragmentary carpometacarpus from Upper Pleistocene layers of the El Abrón Cave in the Pinar del Río province. The find provides the first documented evidence of the species from the western part of Cuba. The associated fauna indicates that the Cuban macaw lived in mosaic, semi-open marshy landscapes, which were probably similar to those in the vicinity of Ciénaga de Zapata in modern times.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author is grateful to Academician A.V. Lopatin (Borissiak Paleontological Institute) for comments on the manuscript; A.K. Agadzhanyan, E.V. Syromyatnikova (Borissiak Paleontological Institute), R. Rojas Consuegra (Center of Oil Research, Havana, Cuba), J. Pajón Morejón, E. Aranda Pedroso, L.A. Barsaga Rodriguez, S. Fiol Gonzalez, and E. Peres Lorenzo (Cuban National Museum of Natural History) for field works at the site; E.S. Belichenko (Borissiak Paleontological Institute) for help in sorting the materials; and E.V. Syromyatnikova for help in map preparation.

Funding

Field works were supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research and SITMA (project no. 18-54-34004 “Late Quaternary Cuban Vertebrates: Relictual faunas on the Eve of the Holocene Extinction”).

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  1. Borissiak Paleontological Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia

    N. V. Zelenkov

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Correspondence to N. V. Zelenkov.

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Translated by T. Tkacheva

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Zelenkov, N.V. Cuban Macaw Ara tricolor in the Upper Pleistocene of Western Cuba. Dokl Biol Sci (2024). https://doi.org/10.1134/S0012496624700947

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