Cuban Macaw (<i>Ara tircolor</i>) in the Upper Pleistocene of western Cuba

The Cuban Macaw, Ara tricolor (Bechstein, 1811), is an extinct species of large parrots with little known historical distribution and ecology. To date, only three late Quaternary paleontological and one archaeozoological (17th–18th centuries) finds of the species have been described from central Cuba. This article describes the new (fourth) fossil record of the Cuban Macaw, a fragmentary carpometacarpus from the Upper Pleistocene layers of El Abrón Cave in Pinar del Río province. This is the first documented evidence of the species from the western part of Cuba. The associated fauna indicates that the Cuban Macaw lived in mosaic, semi-open marshy landscapes, probably similar to those in the vicinity of Ciénaga de Zapata in modern times.