Palaelodus

Palaelodus is an extinct genus of bird of the Palaelodidae family, distantly related to flamingos. They were slender birds with long, thin legs and a long neck resembling their modern relatives, but likely lived very different livestyles. They had straight, conical beaks not suited for filter feeding and legs showing some similarities to grebes. Their precise lifestyle is disputed, with researchers in the past suggesting they may have been divers, while more recent research suggests they may have used their stiff toes as paddles for swimming while feeding on insect larvae and snails. This behavior may have been key in later phoenicopteriforms developing filterfeeding bills. The genus includes between five and eight species and is found across Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Asia and possibly South America. However some argue that most of the taxa named from Europe simply represent differently sized individuals of one single species. Palaelodus was most abundant during the Late Oligocene to Middle Miocene periods, but isolated remains from Australia indicate that the genus, or at least a relative, survived until the Pleistocene.

==History and naming== thumb|Tibiotarsi of Antigone cubensis, [[Propelargus edwardsi and Palaelodus gracilipes at the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin.|left]] The genus Palaelodus was first described by French scientist Alphonse Milne-Edwards in 1863 on the basis of fossils discovered in France's early Miocene deposits of the Saint-Gérand-le-Puy area. Milne-Edwards identified and named three distinct species: Palaelodus ambiguus (the type species), Palaelodus gracilipes and Palaelodus crassipes. In the years following this initial description, Milne-Edwards named two more species: Palaelodus minutus and Palaelodus goliath. In 1933 P. minutus was sunk into P. gracilipes by Lambrecht, a decision not immediately followed by other paleontologists like Brodkorb or Švec, but later accepted by Jacques Cheneval in 1983 during a major revision of the palaelodids of Saint-Gérand-le-Puy. Besides agreeing with the synonymity between P. gracilipes and P. minutus, Cheneval also placed P. goliath in the genus Megapaloelodus, an assessment followed by Heizmann & Hesse (1995). A more conservative number of species was suggested by Mlíkovský in 2002, who placed M. goliath back in Palaelodus, but in turn sunk all of the remaining European Palaelodus species into P. ambiguus, reasoning that they can only be differentiated by size and thus simply represent variation within the species. Although acknowledging that the species proposed by Milne-Edwards may indeed be simply differently sized members of a single taxon, Worthy and colleagues argue that the synonymity proposed by Mlíkovský is premature until a comprehensive comparison of the European material is conducted. Later publications likewise do not follow Mlíkovskýs proposed species model. Palaelodus remains were first recognized in Australia in 1982, but not described until 1998 when Baird and Vickers-Rich erected two new species, P. wilsoni and P. pledgei, based on fossils from the Lake Eyre Basin. Despite being well known from postcrania remains, unambiguous fossils of the skull were long unknown until largely complete crania were described by Cheneval and Escuillié in 1992. Two distal right tibiotarsi recovered in 2008 and 2009 from the Saint Bathans Fauna of the Bannockburn Formation, New Zealand, were described in 2010 by Worthy and colleagues as another new species, Palaelodus aotearoa, and Palaelodus kurochkini was described from remains dating to the Miocene of Mongolia. The most recently named species is P. haroldocontii from the Late Miocene of Argentina.