Ornithologists Describe New Songbird Family from New Zealand
by Sci-News.com
The team has found that three songbirds from New Zealand – the Whitehead, shown in this image, the Yellowhead and the Brown Creeper – belong to a new bird family. Image credit: Andrew Hardacre / CC BY 2.0.
The make this discovery, the team analyzed DNA of three bird species: the Whitehead (Mohoua albicilla), the Yellowhead (Mohoua ochrocephala) and the Brown Creeper (Mohoua novaseelandiae).
“It’s an achievement that has international significance as the taxonomy of birds, especially Australasian songbirds, is the subject of intense research. By conducting DNA sequencing of three bird species — two of them for the first time — the testing confirmed what had been suspected since the 1950s,” explained Dr Luis Ortiz-Catedral and Dr Michael Anderson, both from Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand, who reported the results in the Journal of Ornithology.
The discovery brings the number of New Zealand endemic songbird families to five and increases the number of endemic vertebrate families from 13 to 14 (11 bird, 1 frog, 1 bat, 1 tuatara).
The Whitehead, also known as Pōpokotea, is only found in native and exotic forests in the North Island, while the Yellowhead or Mōhua and the Brown Creeper or Pīpipi are only found in the South and Stewart Islands.
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http://www.sci-news.com/biology/science-new-songbird-family-new-zealand-01347.html