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Rallidae (1 Viewer)

No clue...was simply going with the definition that the paper used for clarity. Honestly the debate over what old term has priority for a given clade I find less interesting than how different critters are related to one another and when they evolved.
 
Looking at the names, there seems to be some convergence:

Rallidae : Rails
  • 7 Crakes + 2 other (Weka; Lord Howe Woodhen)
  • 54 Rails

Fulicidae : Coots & Crakes
  • 13 Rails
  • 80 other (34 crakes, 22 'Hen', 11 Coots, 7 Gallinules, other)


Rallidae tend to have longer bills, which seems to be linked to the name 'Rail'
 
Acanthis said:
Not keen on this bilobed Subfamily approach. Personally I would prefer more subfamilies.
Click to expand...

Looking at the other trees, it looks like the splits between the different groups should be much closer to the base of the tree than is shown in the time-calibrated tree.
There is indeed a lot of uncertainty on the age of a lot of the nodes (also on the finfoot-flufftails node - it could still be older than the splits within rallidae)

Looks to me like a 5-8 subfamily (in 1 family) approach would be better then 2 (sub)families
 
l_raty said:
One cannot use Himantornithidae instead of Fulicidae.
Click to expand...

TomDerutter said:
Looking at the other trees, it looks like the splits between the different groups should be much closer to the base of the tree than is shown in the time-calibrated tree.
There is indeed a lot of uncertainty on the age of a lot of the nodes (also on the finfoot-flufftails node - it could still be older than the splits within rallidae)

Looks to me like a 5-8 subfamily (in 1 family) approach would be better then 2 (sub)families
Click to expand...
We must also take into account the previous study (Garcia-R & al., 2021) which shows that the Himantornithinae are sister of other subfamilies. So, which configuration should we follow, 3 subf. or 2 subf. ?
 
Jim LeNomenclatoriste said:
How would Himantornithinae take priority over Fulicinae?
Click to expand...

TiF uses Gallinulinae Gray 1840 over Fulicinae for one of his three subfamilies, so presumably he considers it to have priority and is either unaware of or rejects Fulicinae Nitzsch, 1829.

He also has Himantornithini Bonaparte, 1856 as a tribe within Porphyrioninae Reichenbach, 1849 following the phylogeny of García-R. et al. (2014). So if he is right,** the priority is Gallinulinae > Porphyrioninae > Himantornithinae > Fulicinae.

* I'll leave it for others to validate or invalidate this conclusion.
 
Fulicariae is available from Nitzsch 1820 Deutsches Archiv für die Physiologie . (Not 1829 as in Bock.) (Nitzsch was followed by Spix, who used Fulicae in 1825 t.2 (1825) - Avium species novae, quas in itinere per Brasiliam annis MDCCCXVII-MDCCCXX - Biodiversity Heritage Library , then Billberg, who used Fulicaeides in 1828 Synopsis faunae Scandinaviae. - Biodiversity Heritage Library . All of these completely overlooked by Bock. Then, only, came Nitzsch 1829 Academiae Fridericianae Halensis ... Prorector Fridericus Blumius ... nomina civium suorum qui in certamine lit. in d. III. Aug. a. 1829 ... indicto praemia ... reportarunt, renunciat ... .)

Gallinulae is available from Goldfuß 1826 Grundriß der Zoologie . (Not Gray 1840 as in Bock. Goldfuß used this name already in 1820 Handbuch der Zoologie , but there he treated Gallinula as subgeneric, hence no family-group name based on it can be accepted from this source.)

Porphyrioneae is of Reichenbach 1848 Novitiae ad synops in avium-neueste Entdeckungen und Nachträge zur Vervollständigung der Classe der Vögel bei Erscheinung des textes. N° IV-V-VII; 1850-1851 . (Not 1849 as in Bock.)

Himanthornitheae (that spelling) is indeed of Bonaparte 1856 t.43 (1856) - Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l'Académie des sciences. - Biodiversity Heritage Library . (Bock had this one right; but Kirchman et al 2021 apparently looked for it in Bock's "Bonaparte 1856a" instead of his "Bonaparte 1856b", where they failed to find it, which led them to attribute it in error to Gray 1871 pt.3 (1871) - Hand-list of genera and species of birds : - Biodiversity Heritage Library .)
 
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l_raty said:
Fulicariae is available from Nitzsch 1820 Deutsches Archiv für die Physiologie . (Not 1829 as in Bock.) (Nitzsch was followed by Spix, who used Fulicae in 1825 t.2 (1825) - Avium species novae, quas in itinere per Brasiliam annis MDCCCXVII-MDCCCXX - Biodiversity Heritage Library , then Billberg, who used Fulicaeides in 1828 Synopsis faunae Scandinaviae. - Biodiversity Heritage Library . All of these completely overlooked by Bock. Then, only, came Nitzsch 1829 Academiae Fridericianae Halensis ... Prorector Fridericus Blumius ... nomina civium suorum qui in certamine lit. in d. III. Aug. a. 1829 ... indicto praemia ... reportarunt, renunciat ... .)

Gallinulae is available from Goldfuß 1826 Grundriß der Zoologie . (Not Gray 1840 as in Bock. Goldfuß used this name already in 1820 Handbuch der Zoologie , but there he treated Gallinula as subgeneric, hence no family-group name based on it can be accepted from this source.)

Porphyrioneae is of Reichenbach 1848 Novitiae ad synops in avium-neueste Entdeckungen und Nachträge zur Vervollständigung der Classe der Vögel bei Erscheinung des textes. N° IV-V-VII; 1850-1851 . (Not 1849 as in Bock.)

Himanthornitheae (that spelling) is indeed of Bonaparte 1856 t.43 (1856) - Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l'Académie des sciences. - Biodiversity Heritage Library . (Bock had this one right; but Kirchman et al 2021 apparently looked for it in Bock's "Bonaparte 1856a" instead of his "Bonaparte 1856b", where they failed to find it, which led them to attribute it in error to Gray 1871 pt.3 (1871) - Hand-list of genera and species of birds : - Biodiversity Heritage Library .)
Click to expand...
😲 Bock is like some kind of taxonomic 'Lord of chaos'!
 
albertonykus said:
Kirchman, J.J., N.R. McInerney, T.C. Giarla, S.L. Olson, E. Slikas, and R.C. Fleischer (2021)
Phylogeny based on ultra-conserved elements clarifies the evolution of rails and allies (Ralloidea) and is the basis for a revised classification
Ornithology (advance online publication)
doi: 10.1093/ornithology/ukab042

The rails (Family Rallidae) are the most diverse and widespread group in the Gruiformes. Their extensive fossil history, global geographic distribution, and tendency to rapidly evolve flightless species on islands make them an attractive subject of evolutionary studies, but the rarity of modern museum specimens of so many rail species has, until recently, limited the scope of molecular phylogenetics studies. As a result, the classification of rails remains one of the most unsettled among major bird radiations. We extracted DNA from museum specimens of 82 species, including 27 from study skins collected as long ago as 1875, and generated nucleotide sequences from thousands of homologous ultra-conserved elements (UCEs). Our phylogenetic analyses, using both concatenation and multispecies coalescent approaches, resulted in well-supported and highly congruent phylogenies that resolve the major lineages of rails and reveal several currently recognized genera to be polyphyletic. A fossil-calibrated time tree is well-resolved and supports the hypothesis that rails split into 2 major lineages (subfamilies Himantornithinae and Rallinae) ~34 mya, but clade age estimates have wide confidence intervals. Our results, combined with results of other recently published phylogenomics studies of rails and other Gruiformes, form the basis for a proposed classification of the Rallidae that recognizes 40 genera in 9 tribes.
Click to expand...
Do you have the figures of this paper?
 
Jim LeNomenclatoriste said:
I can send it to you. However, I advise you to compare this study with the one previously published by Garcia-R & al. (2021)
Click to expand...

Thanks for the Kirchman paper.

So there is pretty good agreement on the subfamily/tribe topology (just need to debock the names). The two differences are the addition of Gynnocrex as an additional tribe (Gymnocrecini) and the position of Fulicini. Kirchman's ML analysis (Fig 1) has Gymnocrecini as sister to Himantornithini with Fulicini sister to the remainder of the subfamily, while Kirchman's species tree (Fig 2) matches the Garcia-R et al (2020; Fig1) topology. The disagreement on position of Fulicini is a good reason for the two subfamily approach over three.
 

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