Wild Turkeys Once Lived in Southern California

 This post is appropriately “published” just prior to Thanksgiving Day, 2021 and gives a nod to the turkey, a bird native to North America. 

The earliest known fossils of turkeys are of early Miocene age (23 million years old). They are from near the small town of Bell, northern Florida in northern Gilchrist County, approximately 30 miles northwest of Gainesville. These fossils belong to the extinct genus Rhegminornis, which was about half the size of the modern genus Meleagris, whose type species is M. galiopavo (also known as the wild turkey). The latter is the largest gallinaceous bird (refers to its order in the classification system of birds) in the New World. It is 3-4 feet tall, 10-40 pounds in weight, and has a wingspan up to 6 feet. These turkeys are very social animals, yet territorial.

Today, M. galiopavo lives in the forests of midwestern and eastern United States and into southeastern Canada. I can verify a Gulf Coast occurrence because I saw a wild turkey in southern Alabama, while I was on a fossil-collecting trip (gastropods and bivalves) many years ago. I can also confirm that this species can fly. The one I saw flew high into a tree top. This wild species is the ancestor of the domestic turkey.

A second living species, M. ocellata, lives in the forests of the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico.

Another species of Meleagris is the extinct Meleagris californica, which lived in southern California during the Pleistocene Ice Age. Bones of this species represent the second most common fossil found in the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits. The most common fossil is the Golden Eagle. Meleagris californica went extinct about 10,000 years ago.

For more detailed information, I highly recommend that you Google rexmachinablog.com for its excellent blog on “The Wild Turkey: the evolution and history of an American icon.”

If you are interested in detailed information about the Rancho La Brea turkeys, see the following pdf (downloadable, for free):

Bockénski, Z.M. and K.E. Campbell, Jr. 2006. The extinct California turkey, Meleagris californica, from Rancho La Brea: comparative osteology and systematics. Contributions in Science, number 509, 92 pp. Natural History Musem of Los Angeles County, California.