Neopsittacus, Salvadori, 1875

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 : 70

Neopsittacus

Neopsittacus comprises two very similar, larger New Guinean lorikeets that, while dorsally green like most lorikeets, have extensive red underparts and underwings and yellow streaked facial plumage. They are placed on a long branch that coalesces with the other members of clade 3, 9.7 Mya (3.2–14.2; fig. 14). Smith et al. (2020) and Joseph et al. (2020) sampled two of three subspecies for each group that exhibits relatively shallow geographic structuring across their range.

Lorius Lorius are midsized, stocky lories, mostly red with green wings and tail, and often with a dark crown. The six species form three sister pairs that are geographically coherent, a finding recovered in previous work using a small multilocus dataset ( Schweizer et al., 2015). The three sister species pairs conform to a longitudinal geographic pattern of diversification and are: the westernmost pair, L. domicella and L. garrulus of Moluccas, Indonesia, was sister to the other two pairs, geographically central L. lory and L. hypoinochrous of New Guinea and surrounding islands; and easternmost L. albidinucha and L. chlorocercus of New Ireland and the Solomon Islands. The genus is absent from geographically intervening islands. The sister pairs Lorius albidinucha / L. chlorocercus and L. lory / L. hypoinochrous form a well-supported clade. Lorius had a crown age 5.3 Mya (1.7–8.2) in the tree presented here (fig. 14), and intraspecific variation continued to diversify into the late Pleistocene ( Smith et al., 2020). Future systematic work on the group should resolve relationships among subspecies and assess whether any warrant species status. Smith et al. (2020) and Joseph et al. (2020) showed that species with geographic variation were monophyletic, but relationships often had lower support.