Saudareos, Joseph, Merwin, and Smith, 2020

Smith, Brian Tilston, Thom, Gregory & Joseph, Leo, 2024, Revised Evolutionary And Taxonomic Synthesis For Parrots (Order: Psittaciformes) Guided By Phylogenomic Analysis, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2024 (468), pp. 1-87 : 74

Saudareos

Saudareos are smaller bodied, largely green lorikeets with long, attenuated tails. They are phenotypically disparate, perhaps reflecting evolutionary reshuffling of a number of plesiomorphic traits among them, e.g., distinctive ear-coverts, well-demarcated chest and belly plumage with narrow, dark terminal barring. This combined with their similarity to either the brightly colored ( Trichoglossus haematodus ) or mostly green Trichoglossus ( T. euteles ) caused confusion in premolecular classification. The taxonomic uncertainty extended beyond Trichoglossus . Saudareos iris was previously placed in Psitteuteles , which is now considered a paraphyletic assemblage of small lorikeets ( Smith et al., 2020). Support for the Saudareos and Eos sister relationship varied across phylogenomic studies, which come from the same dataset but the sequence alignments varied slightly (phylogenomic tree presented here UFBS = 73%; subspecies tree from Smith et al., 2020, UFBS = 100%). The most northerly distributed lorikeet, S. johnstoniae , occurs in the mountains of Mindanao in the southern Philippines and diverged from other members of the genus 4.5 Mya (1.2–7.3; fig. 14). The following nodes reflect the divergence among and potentially within Indonesian archipelagos. Saudareos iris of Timor and Wetar Islands, Lesser Sundas, diverged from S. flavoviridis and S. ornata 3.9 Mya (1–6.9; fig. 14). Saudareos flavoviridis and S. ornata shared a common ancestor 3.4 Mya (0.8–6.3) and both occur on Sulawesi and neighboring islands. The species currently exhibit partial elevational segregation on Sulawesi, which may have contributed to the initial isolation. We note that in our earlier study ( Joseph et al., 2020) Saudareos flavoviridis meyeri was closer to S. ornata than to other S. flavoviridis . Although we have not sampled to this extent in this study, we acknowledge the elevation of meyeri to species rank elsewhere (del Hoyo and Collar, 2014; Gill et al., 2023).