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Passerellidae (1 Viewer)

Good question! Will we need a another new genus for flavovirens?

Sergio Córdoba-Córdoba, 2014. Contrasting Phylogeography and Speciation History of Birds in The Northern Andes: a comparative phylogeographic approach. Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton University:

...To construct the relationships in the Chlorospingus clade, we included most taxa of the genus (except C. flavovirens)...

...For each group I obtained sequences for all the species in the genus (except for one species considered sometimes a subspecies in the hummingbird genus Aglaiocercus (A. berlepschi) and one species in the genus Chlorospingus (C. flavovirens) for which no samples could be obtained)...

Abstract and PDF here
 
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C. flavovirens: that's a shocker! Can't be that many examples of congeneric species turning out to belong to completely different families.

Fulvettas were split from Alcippe and are now often listed in multiple families (depending on the way you treat babbler taxonomy). TiF includes them in three different families - Paradoxornithidae, Pellorneidae and Leiothrichidae (http://jboyd.net/Taxo/List23.html#sylviidae)
 
Junco

Borja Mila, Guillermo T Friis, Pau Aleixandre. Cryptic divergence and evolutionary convergence in the diversification of the songbird genus Junco (Aves: Emberizidae). XIV Congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology. Lisbon, 2013.

Summary:
The rate and magnitude of phenotypic evolution can vary greatly among traits and taxa, and cases of convergent evolution and mutation-order divergence can further confound lineage history and the inference of speciation processes. We use molecular genetic tools and patterns of phenotypic variation to reconstruct the evolutionary history of the songbird genus Junco in order to understand the factors, mechanisms and timing of their diversification across North America. Analysis of mtDNA sequence and AFLPs revealed that plumage diversity in the dark-eyed junco, which has puzzled ornithologists for over a century, evolved recently as the yellow-eyed junco colonized the North American continent from southern Mexico following the Last Glacial Maximum. A new analysis of all known junco forms using a multilocus dataset reveals that junco populations at the tip of Baja California, Guadalupe Island in the Pacific, and the highlands of Guatemala, represent divergent lineages that have been isolated for hundreds of thousands of years, yet have differentiated relatively little in most traits. A phylogeny of the group reveals that the yellow-eyed and dark-eyed juncos are paraphyletic taxa. The Guadalupe junco is an old evolutionary lineage whose similarity to mainland dark-eyed juncos in plumage and eye color is due to convergence. Some phenotypic traits (eye and several plumage color traits) are not phylogenetically informative in juncos, whereas bill color or song characters are more consistent with neutral genetic markers. Drift or mutation-order divergence in long-term geographic isolation likely explains the differentiation of Guatemala and Baja juncos. In contrast, a role for sexual selection must be invoked to explain the rapid diversification of continental dark-eyed junco taxa. New genomic markers are being developed in order to clarify phylogenetic relationships among incipient lineages, identify “divergence islands”, and detect specific regions under selection.
 
Hi guys,

Are you aware if Passerellidae would be finally recognized as a family by some authorities? AFAIK, only John Boyd use it at the moment, right?

Thanks
 
By the way, I've been wandering through 19th C literature lately, and:

- Passerellidae Cabanis & Heine 1850-51 (Passerella Swainson 1837); OS: Passerellinae; OR: subfamily; OD: Cabanis J, Heine F. 1850-51. Museum Heineanum. I. Theil, die Singvögel enthaltend. R Frantz, Halberstadt.; [p.131].
- Arremonidae Lafresnaye 1842 (Arremon Vieillot 1816); OS: Arremoninae; OR: subfamily; OD: Lafresnaye F de, in d'Orbigny C (ed.). 1842. Dictionnaire universel d'histoire naturelle. Tome second. Paris.; [p.153].

Bock 1994 [pdf] had it right for the former, but overlooked Lafresnaye's contributions to Charles d'Orbigny's Dictionnaire, and incorrectly gave the latter as "Arremoninae Sundevall, 1872". That is:
- Arremonidae Sundevall 1872 (Arremon Vieillot 1816); OS: Arremoninae; OR: family; OD: Sundevall CJ. 1872. Methodi naturalis avium disponendarum tentamen: Försök till fogelklassens naturenliga uppställnung. Samson & Wallin, Stockholm; [p.35].
The name is there as well, but this appeared 30 years after its first occurrence. Arremonidae is senior to Passerellidae.
 
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But fails to become the current name because it was unused for 30 years after publication so is a Nomen oblitum?
No, "that" rule said 50 years, not 30, and it fell out of use in 1973. See Article 23.9 of the Code for the current flavour.

Basically:
- No name ever "is a Nomen oblitum" automatically; you need a published nomenclatural act that makes it one.
- The current rule works with a fixed reference date, not with a moving time window. (It was feared that in less-studied groups, some authors might want to "wait" the end of the time period, so that names became forgotten, and might be displaced by newly proposed names.) The fixed date is end of 1899/begin of 1900. You'd need to make sure that Arremonidae, -inae, -ini, -ina, or -whatever, was not used as valid in any publication since that date, whichever the rank. (It may be that it wasn't. The name was in use in the mid-1880's; it certainly appears in some post-1900 publications, but up to now I've only found it in descriptions of pre-1900 classifications which are not adopted by the authors, and this would not count. Unfortunately, the 20th C literature is now much less easily accessible than older works, hence it's easy to miss things; also, finding family-group name with search engines doesn't work very well in my experience, in part because OCR programs often have a hard time with final -æ's. If you want to find everything, you really ought to check everything. Note that TiF uses Arremonini right now for a tribe -- but of course TiF is not published, so this doesn't count.)
- A name can't be made a nomen oblitum unless it threatens a junior name, that must be demonstrably widely established. Here, the "widely established" threatened name would be Passerellidae: you'd need to find at least 25 published works that used this name as valid, by at least 10 different authors, published within the last 50 years (thus no early 20th C literature), and spanning at least 10 years (thus some of them would have to be from before the group started to be recognised as distinct from Old World Emberizidae in the "modern times"). You can try, but I doubt this can be done.
 
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The name originated in 1841 from what publication I am not sure. Louis Aggasiz 1846 says: Arremoninae Lafr. A. 1841. (Arrhemonidae) Nomenclator zoologicus: continens nomina systematica generum ..., Volume 2
 
The name originated in 1841 from what publication I am not sure. Louis Aggasiz 1846 says: Arremoninae Lafr. A. 1841. (Arrhemonidae) Nomenclator zoologicus: continens nomina systematica generum ..., Volume 2
It's probably the same...? 1842 is the date on the title page, but the work was issued in parts and the dating of the parts is unclear. Sherborn & Palmer 1899 concluded: "We therefore urge the advisability of adhering to the dates of the completed volumes rather than to any speculative date of livraisons." See [zoonomen].
 
The original Greek word is ἀρρήμων, ον, speachless. The classical latinisation of ρρ is rrh, see the Appendix B to the 1985 Code; rr is a straight letter-to-letter transliteration, which used to be regarded as "less good" and was frequently "corrected" to the former.
Nowadays, it's the original spelling that counts: Vieillot 1816 wrote it Arremon.
By the way, for non-US readers: The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, [p.319]. (Interesting to see that the attribution there was still correct.)
 
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Yellow-green Bush Tanager

Klicka, Barker, Burns, Lanyon, Lovette, Chaves & Bryson (in press). A comprehensive multilocus assessment of sparrow (Aves: Passerellidae) relationships. Mol Phylogenet Evol. [abstract]
... Importantly, this assemblage now includes the two traditionally thraupid genera Chlorospingus and Oreothraupis (although the former is polyphyletic, with C. flavovirens remaining placed among the tanagers). ...
AOU-SACC...
67a. Klicka et al. (2014) found that flavovirens was not a member of Chlorospingus and was actually a true tanager (Thraupidae). SACC proposal badly needed.
Forthcoming (will the authors describe a new genus?)...

Avendaño, Barker & Cadena (in review). The Yellow-green Bush-tanager is not a bush-tanager nor a sparrow: Molecular phylogenetics reveals that Chlorospingus flavovirens is a tanager (Aves: Passeriformes; Thraupidae).

Hilty 2011 (HBW 16).
 
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... (will the authors describe a new genus?)...
Hard to say without knowing where the species belongs. Or did I miss something here?
Klicka et al. 2014 [pdf] said nothing about its placement, except that it remained placed among the tanagers.
So far as I can assess, no data associated to this study seem to be available in Genbank at all. (In what seems to be the version of record of the work, you can read: "All sequences were deposited in GenBank (accession numbers XXX–XXX)."... :eek!:)
 
Robert W. Bryson, Jr., Brant C. Faircloth, Whitney L. E. Tsai, John E. McCormack, and John Klicka (2016) Target enrichment of thousands of ultraconserved elements sheds new light on early relationships within New World sparrows (Aves: Passerellidae). The Auk: July 2016, Vol. 133, No. 3, pp. 451-458.

[abstract]
 

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