Northiella, Mathews, 1912

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 : 61

Northiella

Northiella are small-bodied parrots, with attenuated tails, but uniquely grayish-olive plumage punctuated by distinctively yellow or red wing-covert patches, blue facial feathering, (two-toned blue in N. naretha e) and their prominent red or yellow abdominal (belly) patches. Their harsh contact calls recall those of Platycercus rosellas, but they also have a unique whistled vocalization. Phylogeographic work on what had been construed as one species, N. haematogaster , revealed genetic structuring to the extent of 2.16% mtDNA sequence divergence between what are now recognized as two species ( Dolman and Joseph, 2015), N. haematogaster and N. narethae . In comparison to the temporal estimate of their divergence derived by converting the mtDNA distance with a standard 2% molecular clock, our phylogenomic estimate of divergence between these taxa is about twice as old at 2 Mya (0.8–3.1; fig. 11).