Poicephalus, Swainson, 1837

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 : 22

publication ID

https://doi.org/ 10.1206/0003-0090.468.1.1

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Felipe (2024-07-18 23:17:32, last updated by Juliana 2024-07-29 18:20:47)

scientific name

Poicephalus
status

 

Poicephalus View in CoL

The Poicephalus parrots are a small radiation endemic to Africa. They are midsized stocky parrots, predominantly green with dark upperparts but with species-specific bands of color often on the abdominal (belly) plumage, underwings and rump. We note below (see Psephotellus of Australia) a possible case of convergent plumage evolution involving several species of Poicephalus .

Pioneering molecular work on Poicephalus ( Massa et al., 2000) was based on random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD). While one of its findings, a sister-group relationship between P. cryptoxanthus and P. meyeri , may have reflected plesiomorphy or homoplasy, many of their results are supported broadly here.

The radiation of Poicephalus had a crown age of 7.5 Mya and the majority of the species had divergences in the Pliocene (fig. 3). The topology within Poicephalus was less robust due to low-quality samples and nodes with low support. The issues likely stemmed from the P. flavifrons and P. rueppellii samples coming from historical samples that produced limited data, making them harder to place in the tree. Poicephalus fuscicollis also had lower-quality data and did not meet more stringent filters of quality control of Smith et al. (2023); it was, however, sister to P. robustus in the phylogenomic trees. This result was consistent with previous phylogenetic work based on mtDNA but inconsistent with a phylogeny inferred from concatenated nuclear and mtDNA, which found P. robustus to be more closely related to P. gulielmi ( Coetzer et al., 2015) . Poicephalus crassus is known from few museum specimens and has not been sequenced. Given the close similarity in plumage in P. crassus and P. cryptoxanthus , they are likely closely related. The positions of P. rufiventris and P. senegalus varied between estimated trees, but the species tree had a better phylogenetic resolution. Recent work describes an unrecognized subspecies in P. rueppellii that differs in size and plumage color across populations in Angola ( Hubers et al., 2023).

Coetzer, W. G., C. T. Downs, M. R. Perrin, and S. Willows- Munro. 2015. Molecular systematics of the Cape Parrot (Poicephalus robustus): implications for taxonomy and conservation. PLoS One 10: e 0133376.

Hubers, J., H. Schnitker, and H. van Grouw. 2023. Notes on a recently described subspecies, and the poorly known nominate subspecies of Ruppell's Parrot, Poicephalus rueppellii mariettae and P. r. rueppellii. Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club 143: s 66 - 7.

Massa, R., et al. 2000. A molecular approach to the taxonomy and biogeography of African parrots. Italian Journal of Zoology 67: 313 - 317.

Smith, B. T., et al. 2023. Phylogenomic analysis of the parrots of the world distinguishes artifactual from biological sources of gene tree discordance. Systematic Biology 72 (1): 228 - 241.

Kingdom

Animalia

Phylum

Chordata

Class

Aves

Order

Psittaciformes

Family

Psittacidae

Kingdom

Animalia

Phylum

Chordata

Class

Aves

Order

Psittaciformes

Family

Psittacidae