Great Curassow

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Great Curassow
male
female rufous morph
Conservation status
Near Threatened (IUCN 3.1)
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Aves
Order:	Galliformes
Family:	Cracidae
Genus:	Crax
Species:	C. rubra
Binomial name
Crax rubra Linnaeus, 1758
Subspecies
Crax rubra rubra Linnaeus, 1758 Common Great Curassow Crax rubra griscomi Nelson[verification needed], 1926 Cozumel Great Curassow
Synonyms
Crax chapmani (barred morph female) Crax globicera Crax hecki (barred morph female) Crax panamensis

The Great Curassow (Crax rubra) is a large, black pheasant-like bird with a yellow knob on its bill, curly black feather crests, and white below. Together with a few other curassows, it is among the largest members of the family Cracidae,^[1][2] at 78–92 cm (30–34 in) and a weight of up to 4.8 kg (10.5 lbs).^[1] There are three morphs of female Great Curassows: Barred morph females with barred neck, mantle, wings and tail, rufous morph with an overall reddish brown plumage and a barred tail, and dark morph female with a blackish neck, mantle and tail (the tail often faintly vermiculated), and some barring to the wings. In most regions only one or two morphs occur, and females showing a level of intermediacy between these morphs are known (e.g. resembling rufous morph, but with black neck and faint vermiculations to wings).

A monogamous species, the Great Curassow is distributed in rainforest from eastern Mexico throughout Central America, to western Colombia and northwest Ecuador. Its diet consists mainly of fruits, figs and arthropods.

Contents 1 Paleontology of the Great Curassow 2 Ecology 3 References 4 External links

[edit] Paleontology of the Great Curassow

The Great Curassow is the most northernly Crax species. It is part of a clade that inhabited the north of South America since about 9 mya (Tortonian, Late Miocene). As the Colombian Andes were uplifted around 6 mya, this species' ancestors were cut off from the population to their southeast. The latter would in time evolve into the Blue-billed Curassow. The ancestral Great Curassows then spread along the Pacific side of the Andes, and into Central America during the Pliocene and Pleistocene (Pereira & Baker 2004) as part of the Great American Interchange.

[edit] Ecology

Due to ongoing habitat loss and overhunting in some areas, the Great Curassow is evaluated as Near Threatened on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, and it has recently been suggested it should be uplisted to Vulnerable (BirdLife International, 2008). It is listed on Appendix III of CITES in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Colombia and Honduras. Of the smaller subspecies griscomi of Cozumel Island, only a few hundred remain. Its population seems either to have been slowly increasing since the 1980s, or to be fluctuating at a low level; it is vulnerable to hurricanes (del Hoyo 1994, BirdLife International 2004, see also Cozumel Thrasher).

This species has proven to produce fertile hybrids with its closest living relative the Blue-billed Curassow, and also with the much more distantly related Black Curassow (del Hoyo 1994)

[edit] References

• BirdLife International (2008). Crax rubra. In: IUCN 2008. IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Downloaded on 25 December 2008. Database entry includes a brief justification of why this species is near threatened
• BirdLife International (2008): Great Curassow (Crax rubra): uplist to Vulnerable?. Accessed 17-01-2009.
• Pereira, Sérgio Luiz & Baker, Allan J. (2004): Vicariant speciation of curassows (Aves, Cracidae): a hypothesis based on mitochondrial DNA phylogeny. Auk 121(3): 682-694. [English with Spanish abstract] DOI:10.1642/0004-8038(2004)121[0682:VSOCAC]2.0.CO;2 HTML abstract HTML fulltext without images

[edit] External links

• BirdLife Species Factsheet
• Stamps (for British Honduras-(now Belize), El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico) with RangeMap
• Great Curassow photo gallery VIREO Photo-High Res
• Photo-High Res