The “Buzzard” stamp from the “Birds of Prey” series was issued on November 29, 1965. Print run: 4,000,000 copies. Artist: N. Kalita.
The common buzzard, also known as “sarych,” has been known to people since ancient times, and its scientific description was made by Carl Linnaeus in 1758. It was given the Latin name Buteo buteo; in addition to this species, the genus of true buzzards includes some three dozen others.
Buzzards belong to the order Accipitriformes. According to the most widespread version, its earliest representatives appeared soon after the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction, when a large number of ecological niches became available, including for flying predators.
The oldest fossil representative of hawk-like birds, Masiliraptor, inhabited the planet 50 million years ago. From it and subsequent species that have not survived to the present day, the current ones descended; the process of forming modern genera and species stretched over tens of millions of years.
As genetic studies have shown, modern buzzards are a young genus. It split from the other accipitriforms about 5 million years ago; however, the species that lived on Earth then have already gone extinct, and the modern ones appeared only about 300,000 years ago.