Gaviiformes
Sign in to saveGaviiformes () is an order of aquatic birds containing the loons or divers and their closest extinct relatives. Modern gaviiformes are found in many parts of North America and northern Eurasia (Europe, Asia and debatably Africa), though prehistoric species were more widespread.
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Gaviiformes is an order of birds within the class Aves, phylum Chordata, and kingdom Animalia. It belongs to the parent taxon Aequornithes. The taxon has the common name lomfugler, also recorded as lomfåglar, and its status is accepted. This order is described in the Armenian Soviet Encyclopedia.
The group is found in marine, brackish, and freshwater habitats. Its start time is dated to about 70 million years ago. The taxon is distinct from Nury and Masovian Voivodeship.
Synthesized by Vinony from 25 facts across 5 sources: Wikidata, GBIF, Gbif Occ, WoRMS, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.
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Encyclopedic overview
7 sectionsContents
- Classification and evolution
- Fossil record
- See also
- References
- Bibliography
- Further reading
- External links
Gaviiformes () is an order of aquatic birds containing the loons or divers and their closest extinct relatives. Modern gaviiformes are found in many parts of North America and northern Eurasia (Europe, Asia and debatably Africa), though prehistoric species were more widespread.
==Classification and evolution== There are five living species, and all are placed in the genus Gavia. The loons were formerly often considered to be the most ancient of the northern hemisphere bird families; this idea grew basically out of the perceived similarity of shape and (probably) habits between loons and the entirely unrelated extinct Cretaceous order Hesperornithiformes. In particular Enaliornis, which was apparently an ancestral and plesiomorphic member of that order, was sometimes used to support claims of Albian (Early Cretaceous) Gaviiformes.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Gaviiformes” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.