Males have black plumage, except for a white crissum (the area around the cloaca), with curly feathers on the head and red bill ornaments and wattles.

Young C. globulosa males are easily confused with those of the yellow-knobbed curassows (C. daubentoni), but the latter has a white tail-margin and yellow (not orange) bill wattle.

[3] The wattled curassow is one of the Crax species described in 1825 by Johann Baptist von Spix; the type locality is the Solimões (middle Amazon River) region.

Crax is a term for curassows introduced by Mathurin Jacques Brisson in his 1760s Ornithologia and adopted by Linnaeus as a genus name in the Systema naturae.

Its origins date back some 6–5.5 mya ago (Messinian, Late Miocene) when its ancestors became isolated in the western Amazon rainforest.

Though externally still fairly alike, the two species have vastly different calls and probably evolved, at about the same time, at opposite ends of the original southern Crax curassow's range.

The red cere of the western black curassow may well be due to occasional hybrid introgression of C. globulosa alleles, as it is unlikely that the Solimões is entirely impassable to these birds.

[3] It has been found from the western and southwestern Amazon Basin of Brazil west to the Andes foothills of southeastern Colombia, eastern Ecuador and Peru, and northern Bolivia.

Its area of occurrence is essentially delimited by the Caquetá-Japurá, Solimões, Amazon and Madeira Rivers, and the 300 meter contour line towards the Andes.

In Brazil, the bird is only found in the wild in Amazonas state (it used to occur in Rondônia also), namely near the Juruá, the Javary, the Japurá, and at its northeasternmost limit around the confluence regions along the Solimões, Madeira, Rio Negro, and the Purus Rivers.

Some have found it in terra firme rainforest on higher ground, but it probably occurs there in any numbers only in the wet season when the lowlands are flooded.

[6] As almost all Galliformes do, it eats mostly plant matter, supplemented by some small (typically invertebrate) animals—including at least on occasion crustaceans and fish –, but hardly any actual data exists.

When foraging, it has been observed to rummage around on the ground less often than other Crax curassows, indicating that it may favor different food items (e.g. fresh fruit instead of dropped seeds) than its closest relatives.

Couples presumably form for years, often essentially for life, as in other curassows; a change of partners may occur occasionally, and were males are frequently hunted (their loud calls make them easy to stalk) survivors may pair up with more than one female.

It is nowhere numerous, and the only known region where it can be encountered reasonably often might be along the Juruá River in Brazil, in particular in the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve; it is also present in some numbers near San Marcos in Beni Department, Bolivia.

But any undiscovered populations are unlikely to be large—and even though they might remain unknown to science as soon as hunting with firearms starts in a region the wattled curassow is liable to get shot more often than it reproduces.