Described from the Ardennes? :eek!::eek!::eek!:
We don't have that many shearwaters in the Ardennes... 8-P
Ardenna was introduced as a genus-group name by Reichenbach (
1852: Avium Systema Naturale / Das natürliche System der Vögel), who attributed it to Ulysses Aldrovandus. (Aldrovandus was pre-Linnean, hence his names "do not count" in nomenclature.)
Aldrovandus (
1603: Ornithologiae. Tomus tertius, ac postremus, book XIX, chapter III, pp.57-62) did not actually use "
Ardenna", though, but instead "
Artenna", in a chapter covering what he otherwise called
Avis Diomedea ("Diomedean Bird"), and presenting it as the name used for this bird by the inhabitants of the Tremiti islands (formerly
Diomedeae insulae), in the Adriatic sea. This
Avis Diomedea is the Scopoli's Shearwater (there is even a rather recognizable
illustration on p.59).
Nevertheless,
Reichenbach designated as type species for his
Ardenna,
Puffinus major Faber, 1822, the
Stóra Skrofa of Iceland, which is the Great Shearwater.
For what it's worth, cox1 has a signal very similar to cytb regarding the relationships between the three shearwater goups:
Calonectris appears slightly closer to
Puffinus s.s. than
Ardenna, but without statistical support. With each gene in isolation, the relationship does not survive ML bootstrapping (bootstrap support <50%: trichotomy in the consensus trees). Combining the two genes produces slightly better results but, even then, support remains unsatisfactory (I get supports ranging between 55 and 65%, depending on which taxa are included in the analysis -- I have attached an example). No other gene has published sequences for members of the three groups.
(Also, re. the last point in the SACC proposal: to match the data,
P. subalaris should not simply "precede
P. lherminieri and
P. assimilis". It should precede
P. puffinus.)