A New Shorebird from the Upper Pliocene

One of the avian fossils recovered from the Saw Rock Canyon local fauna of the Upper Pliocene of Seward County, Kansas, is the humerus of a scolopacine shorebird which closely resembles the Recent Tringa solitaria. Present evidence favors a late Hemphillian age for the fauna (Hibbard, 1964. Pap. Michigan Acad. Sci., Arts, and Letters, 49: 115-127), and the fauna is taken from a lower section of the Rexroad formation than are the Fox Canyon and Rexroad local faunas of the Rexroad formation of Meade County, Kansas. Many of the mammals in the Saw Rock Canyon local fauna are considered to be ancestral to those of the Fox Canyon and Rexroad local faunas (op. cit.). The Saw Rock Canyon locality is given in Hibbard (1950. Contrib. Mus. Paleontol., Univ. Michigan, 8: 113-192)