Psittrichas, Lesson, 1831

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 : 47-48

Psittrichas and Coracopsis

The family Psittrichasidae is phenotypically and biogeographically diverse but comprises a low number of species in two monotypic subfamilies Psittrichasinae for Psittrichas and Coracopseinae for Coracopsis and is consistently placed as closely related to Psittaculidae . Psittrichasidae exhibits an unusual transoceanic distribution, where the monotypic subfamily Psittrichasinae ( Psittrichas fulgidus ) of New Guinea was sister to small radiation in Coracopseinae ( Coracopsis ) found in Madagascar and adjacent islands. The approximately 7000 km gap across the Indian Ocean between the ranges of these lineages was also unusual in that the divergence date was 30.4 Mya (22.3–35.4) (figs. 1, 10), some 40 million years after proposed Gondwana vicariant events observed in other sister taxa that show this disjunct distribution ( Chakrabarty et al., 2012). The historical biogeography that accompanied this astonishing pattern of phylogeny warrants comment. Selvatti et al. (2022) reject Schweizer et al.’s (2011) proposal of dispersal across exposed land in the southern Indian Ocean, the Kerguelen Plateau–Broken Ridge hypothesis. They instead provided geological data in favor of an alternative history involving dispersal through Indomalaya and then south across the now submerged microcontinent of Mauritia .

Psittrichas fulgidus has an elongate bill, is among the largest parrots, and is utterly unlike any other parrot in its distinctive black and red plumage and black facial skin ( Forshaw and Knight, 2010). It occurs widely across montane forests in New Guinea and has no described subspecies.

Coracopsis comprises 2–4 grayish-brown species that occur on Madagascar, Seychelles, and Comoro Islands, one of which, C. vasa , has extraordinary reproductive biology reviewed by Ekstrom et al. (2007). The uncertainty in species limits reflects that some recognize the C. nigra subspecies sibilans and barklyi as species. In our study we included C. nigra , C. vasa , and C. barklyi and found discordance between the concatenated and species tree topologies. The species tree topology matches the mtDNA tree of Podsiadlowski et al. ( Podsiadlowski et al., 2017) where C. barklyi was sister to C. nigra and C. vasa . The time-calibrated concatenated topology has C. nigra and C. barklyi diverging 4.5 Mya (1.7–6.5) and subsequently coalescing to a common ancestor with C. vasa 8.6 Mya (3.9–12.1; fig. 10).