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Message: <blockquote data-quote="l_raty" data-source="post: 1385892" data-attributes="member: 24811">Nothing really conclusive, and the nomenclatural ambiguity doesn't help.GenBank has a number of sequences, that all come from the Baker lab, and that are labelled "Burhinus magnirostris (beach thick-knee)". These sequences come from two general studies of the phylogeny of the Charadriiformes, in which no other Burhinidae were included. It seems likely to me that all of them were obtained from the same sample/specimen.For two of the genes involved (12s-rRNA and rag-1), there are enough  sequences of other species, from other studies, to build trees that give a rough idea of the evolution of Burhinidae. In both cases, the Baker "Burhinus magnirostris" clusters with Old World Burhinus spp, while New World Burhinus spp appear basal in the family (and pretty distant from the rest). Thus, if the bird from which the Baker sequences were obtained was indeed a Beach Thick-knee, then Esacus would seem to be embedded in Burhinus.Problem: the Baker sequences include a coi sequence that, when I enter it in the BOLD barcode identification engine, appears perfectly identical to three (validated) sequences of B. grallarius... Another (unvalidated) sequence from the database, also labelled "B. magnirostris", appears almost 10% away. This strongly suggests that the Baker sequences are actually of the Bush, not of the Beach Thick-knee, perhaps from a specimen labeled using an outdated nomenclature.In the barcode identification trees, the other "B. magnirostris" sequence appears slightly less basal than those of B. grallarius (i.e., closer to B. oedicnemus and B. vermiculatus than the latter). Should this be correct (or just marginally incorrect, with the Beach Thick-knee only slightly more basal than B. grallarius), Esacus would probably still be embedded in Burhinus. But 10% of the coi is a divergence level at which I place very, very little confidence in relationships appearing in NJ barcode trees.On the other hand, even if Esacus ends up embedded in Burhinus, the divergence levels in the group as a whole seem large. In fact, based on 12s and rag-1, New World Burhinus seem at least as far away from Old World Burhinus as oystercatchers are from avocets... Thus it might also be that further splitting of Burhinus could be a better solution than merging it with Esacus.Laurent -</blockquote>

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