Cyanoramphus, Bonaparte, 1854

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 : 60

Cyanoramphus

Cyanoramphus are small to midsized, largely green with long tails that radiated in New Zealand and surrounding islands of the South Pacific as well as eastward to the remote archipelago of the Society Islands. Cyanoramphus was estimated to have diverged from Eunymphicus of New Caledonia and the Loyalty Islands 8.2 Mya (3.2– 12) and diversification within the group was estimated to have begun 5.5 Mya (2–8.2; fig. 11). Systematic relationships with Cyanoramphus have been and still are hampered by incomplete taxon and genetic sampling, a reminder that we have not sampled the extinct Cyanoramphus ulietanus and C. zealandicus . Comparison of the phylogenomic tree with mtDNA data ( Rawlence et al., 2015) was limited because of the low support in our concatenated tree. These conditions are analogous to that of Pyrrhura —a rapid radiation and degraded DNA from historical specimens. The phylogenomic results confirm that classifying taxa together based on color of head plumage was not consistent with the phylogeny, an observation that was used to elevate several taxa to species rank. All trees agree that C. forbesi and C. auriceps are not sister species. Cyanoramphus forbesi was previously classified as a subspecies with C. auriceps because both have a red frontal band and yellow crown. The phylogenomic tree has C. forbesi as sister to the endangered C. cooki , of Norfolk Island, albeit with low support (UFBS = 51%). The mtDNA tree has C. cooki as sister to all other Cyanoramphus , excluding C. forbesi . Regardless, if C. cooki and C. forbesi were sister or on successive nodes, then they shared a common ancestor 4.7 Mya (1.7–7.3). The mtDNA tree and our phylogenomic trees agree that C. saisseti was sister to all other Cyanoramphus whereas species tree had the more plainly patterned C. unicolor in this position. Cyanoramphus hochstetteri , which was formerly a subspecies of C. novaezelandiae , was most closely related to C. malherbi and C. unicolor in the mtDNA and the concatenated phylogenomic tree (fig. 11).