Prioniturus, Wagler, 1832

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 : 50

Prioniturus

The racquet-tailed parrots ( Prioniturus ) comprise a small radiation in the Philippines and Indonesia. The species are largely green and stocky with rounded tails in which the central tail feathers have extended bare shafts protruding from the distal end of the tail and terminating with a racquet of feather barbs ( Forshaw and Knight, 2010). An mtDNA phylogeny of Prioniturus inferred three separate clades ( Schweizer et al., 2012): (1) mada and platurus; (2) waterstradti , montanus , platenae, and mindorensis ; and (3) discurus , luconensis , verticalis, and flavicans ). Our phylogenomic results are largely congruent but with some notable exceptions. We confirm the finding of Schweizer et al. (2012) that P. discurus is paraphyletic. All phylogenetic data showed that P. [ discurus ] mindorensis was highly supported as a member of clade 2, which does not include nominotypical P. d. discurus . The species recognition of P. mindorensis appears further warranted, although its phenotypic divergence is primarily in iris color (pale, not dark) and much reduced blue throughout the plumage. Within clade 2, the position of P. montanus differed between the mtDNA and phylogenomic tree. The phylogenomic tree had P. montanus as sister to P. waterstradti (UFBS = 100%), whereas the mtDNA tree places the taxon as sister to all other members of clade 2. The trees also differed with the placement of P. flavicans . In the phylogenomic tree, P. flavicans was sister to all other members of clade 3, whereas in the mtDNA tree P. flavicans was sister to only P. discurus and P. luconensis . The phylogenomic species tree places P. flavicans outside clade 3 as sister to clades 2 and 3. It is unclear to what extent the position of P. flavicans in the species tree was driven by a lower-quality sample. The P. flavicans sample was retained after more moderate data filtering, but in the most stringent approach the sample was dropped. The radiation of Prioniturus , which was estimated to have begun 8.4 Mya (4.9–11.2; fig. 10), reflects the complex relationships among islands within the Philippines and Indonesia ( Brown et al., 2013).