Primolius, Bonaparte, 1857

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 : 46

Primolius

Primolius consists of three smaller, predominantly green macaws. Ara and Primolius are estimated to have shared a common ancestor 7.1 Mya (3.1–10), a depth of divergence comparable to other intergeneric splits in Arini (fig. 9). There was discordance between the phylogenomic concatenated and species trees, but relationships in both trees are highly supported. In the concatenated tree, P. couloni was sister to P. maracana and P. auricollis , whereas in the species tree, P. auricollis was sister to P. couloni and P. maracana . The topology from Provost et al. (2018) is concordant with the phylogenomic tree presented here. Despite the apparent lack of strong phenotypic patterns favoring one topology versus the other, both nodes have divergences estimated to have occurred within the Late Pliocene to Pleistocene. The case for the priority of Primolius over Propyrrhura as the correct genus for these three species has been made by Penhallurick (2001) and cf. Whitney (1996).