Micropsittini

Smith, Brian Tilston, Thom, Gregory & Joseph, Leo, 2024, Revised Evolutionary And Taxonomic Synthesis For Parrots (Order: Psittaciformes) Guided By Phylogenomic Analysis, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2024 (468), pp. 1-87 : 48

Micropsittini

Micropsitta Micropsitta are the smallest parrots. They are largely green with modified, strengthened tail shafts and metatarsals having long claws, which are adaptations for foraging on tree trunks. The clade has a deep stem age of 27.6 Mya (19.8– 32.6) and crown age of only 4.1 Mya (2.8–5.2) indicating that extinction was responsible for the long branch (figs. 1, 10). There was considerable discordance between the phylogenomic concatenated and species trees within Micropsitta . In the concatenated tree, M. bruijnii , which ranges from Moluccas, Indonesia, across all of New Guinea to the Solomon Islands, was sister to the other two clades. Although with low support in the concatenated tree, M. keiensis was sister to M. finschii and these two were sister to a clade in which M. geelvinkiana was in turn sister to M. meeki and M. pusio (fig. 10). In contrast, M. keiensis and then M. geelvinkiana on consecutive nodes, were sister to the remaining Micropsitta in the species tree with strong support. The discordant relationships in the species tree were likely due to gene tree estimation error caused by low quality samples ( Smith et al., 2023).