University of Washington - Dept of Paleontology - Seattle
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Publication Date:
2008
PNAS March 18, 2008 vol. 105 no. 11 4077-4078
For many years, it was widely assumed that Chendytes had been lost toward the end of the Pleistocene, even though there were early reports of material from archaeological contexts. Survival well into the Holocene became clear in 1976, when G. V. Morejohn (11) reported C. lawi bones in an archaeological site north of Santa Cruz, California dated to between 5,400 and 3,800 14C years ago. He estimated that the extinction of this bird had occurred between 2,500 and 3,000 years ago.