Keith,
Nice summary - what about all the kingfisher anagrams of genera?
MJB
You mean
Dacelo and
Lacedo?
As far as I can tell (and I have not seen the original publications), the former was first combined as
Dacelo gigantea and the latter as
Lacedo pulchella. As
gigantea and
pulchella are both feminine adjectives, both generic names are feminine (given that they are anagrams and thus not words in any language). If the adjectives had been indeterminate wrt gender (e.g.
nepalensis), both genera would have been masculine, because their endings do not indicate anything else.
Pushing things further back ...
Alcedo is a Latin feminine noun, so is feminine as a generic name. Its adjectival specific epithets were also feminine, of course. When
Dacelo was formed,
gigantea was transferred to it, with no change in the form of the name, so
Dacelo becomes feminine (
Dacelo gigantea was later synonymised with
Dacelo novaeguineae, so the epithet is no longer in use).
Lacedo was later formed, as a monotypic genus for the former
Dacelo pulchella, and took the specific epithet unchanged. I think it could be questioned whether the authors of these anagrams showed any deliberate action in setting the gender of their generic names - they merely transferred specific epithets, and thus the gender of the
Alcedo name was carried through to its spin-off genera.
Keith