Phoebastria Reichenbach, 1852

Mourer-Chauviré, Cécile & Geraads, Denis, 2010, The Upper Pliocene Avifauna of Ahl al Oughlam, Morocco. Systematics and Biogeography, Records of the Australian Museum 62 (1), pp. 157-184 : 159

Genus Phoebastria Reichenbach, 1852

Although albatrosses are no longer present in the North Atlantic, they were numerous during the Pliocene whith five species known from the marine deposits of the Yorktown Formation in North Carolina, USA (Olson & Rasmussen, 2001). In the Palaearctic region, an extinct species was described from England, Phoebastria anglica ( Lydekker, 1891) . It was previously known by a tarsometatarsus and pedal phalanx from the Red Crag, Foxhall, Suffolk, and by an ulna from the Coralline Crag, Orford, Suffolk (C. Harrison & Walker, 1978). To those remains have been added a complete ulna and a partial humerus from the Nordwich Crag, Suffolk ( Dyke et al., 2007). These localities are dated to the upper Pliocene and are therefore contemporaneous with Ahl al Oughlam.

All of the fossil albatrosses found at Ahl al Oughlam belong to the genus Phoebastria , most of whose species live in the Pacific Ocean, generally North of the tropic of Cancer. The exception is P. irrorata , the Waved Albatross, or Galapagos Albatross, which lives in the intertropical zone of the East Pacific (del Hoyo et al., 1992). It is possible that, before the closure of the Panamanian Isthmus, there were circular oceanic currents around the earth that made it easier for organisms to be dispersed between the North Pacific and the North Atlantic. We know that species of the genus Phoebastria survived for at least 2 Ma in the North Atlantic after the closure of the Panamanian Isthmus because Olson & Hearty (2003) showed that a breeding colony of P. albatrus was present on Bermuda and was probably extirpated by the sea-level rise of the Marine Isotope Stage 11 interglacial, dated at about 400,000 years ago.

With the exception of a New Zealand population of D. epomophora , all the Recent albatrosses breed on islands, due to avoidance of mammalian predators. The Ahl al Oughlam albatrosses could have bred in the Canary, Salvage, Madeira, or Azores archipelagoes.