Toxorhamphinae

Schoddei, Richard & Christidis, Les, 2014, Relicts from Tertiary Australasia: undescribed families and subfamilies of songbirds (Passeriformes) and their zoogeographic signal, Zootaxa 3786 (5), pp. 501-522 : 505-506

Subfamily Toxorhamphinae , subfamilia nova ―tube-tongued longbills

Type genus: Toxorhamphus Stresemann, 1914

Diagnosis. Small, plain citrine-yellow and grey songbirds with extremely long curved bills, broad wings, short white-tipped tails and indistinct, finely-feathered periorbital rings; sexes monomorphic except for smaller, shortertailed females; head slender with tight neck skin, the bill attenuated and decurved but straight-sided and narrowing only towards tip, uniformly black, tomia microscopically dentate distally with fine, even tuberculate teeth that, on the maxilla, are formed compoundly on broader shallow serrations, narial depression elongate elliptic, with inoperculate, holorhinal and internally fully pervious nostrils opening externally in a long, meliphagid-like slit along ventral margin of narial depression, rictal bristles undeveloped; corneous tongue a long slender tube, with a lipped bowl at the base and a shallowly and serrately quadrifid tip in which the medial furcation is much shallower than the two lateral furcations and their four lobes are terminally truncate and serrately toothed on the outer margins only―the teeth overlap one another and interlock immediately behind the tips of the lobes to form the distal section of the tongue tube which can then open and close progressively at the tip under controlled pressure from behind; skull with fully perforate interorbital septum except for vestigial medial bar, thickened, well-winged ectethmoids that reach the jugal bar, an aperturate palate with truncated, multi-tipped vomer, filamentous, spathuloid-tipped maxillo-palatines, slender palatines with shelf expanded distally through extension of transpalatine processes, and small, shallow and moderately-defined temporal fossae flanked by short, ellipsoid postorbital processes projecting ventrally and long, spine-like zygomatic processes projecting anteriorly; sternum rectangular and moderately narrow, with deep keel c. 1 x sternum width, lateral trabeculae slender, c. ⅓–½ x length of sternum, hardly flared at tips, sternal rostrum short and deeply bilaterally compressed; wings broad and moderately rounded, primaries 10 with p10 well-developed and rather broad, p7–p6 longest, and p8=p5; humeral fossae near single, with deep, trabeculated outer fossa and distinct, if shallow, tricipital fossa, the incisura capitis rather deep, ventral tubercle much protuberant, and pectoral crest long and decurrent below fossae; tail short and square-tipped, tail/wing ratio c. (0.47–)0.50–0.54(–0.58), the rectrices 12, straight-sided with rounded tips; feet short, with rather slender toes and scutellate-laminiplantar tarsi, the scutes angled obliquely across the acrotarsus. Nest a neat, closely and smoothly woven perched cup of fine plant fiber, lined with a dense felt of white plant down, finely and smoothly walled over the outside with camouflaging green bryophytes, algae, cobweb and sometimes white spider egg sacs, and bound at the base to the top of a narrow horizontal twig or fork in shrubbery c. 2–3 m above ground; eggs 1 per clutch, ovoid, matt pale greyish blue sprinkled sparsely with fine pale red to purplish-red spots concentrated at the larger end. Versatile, forest-living nectarivores and insectivores of forest lower stages, probing and gleaning actively, nervously and acrobatically up to forest mid-stages, flying swiftly and directly between sites and calling with repeated tweeting in flight; apparently monogamous.

Range and composition. Lowland to montane rainforests of New Guinea; one genus: Toxorhamphus Stresemann, 1914 , of two species: T. novaeguineae (Lesson, 1827) , lowland New Guinea, and T. poliopterus (Sharpe, 1882) , montane New Guinea.

Group name. The term “tube-tongued longbill” expresses an obvious and easily identified family-group difference from the plumed longbills, Oedisomatinae.