Abyssinian ground hornbill
species of bird
The Abyssinian ground hornbill or northern ground hornbill (Bucorvus abyssinicus) is an African bird, found north of the equator, and is one of two species of ground hornbill. It is the second largest species of African hornbill, only surpassed by the slightly larger southern ground hornbill.
Taxonomy
The Abyssinian ground hornbill was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1780 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux. The bird was also illustrated in a hand-coloured plate engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet in the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle which was produced under the supervision of Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text. Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial name Buceros abyssinicus in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées. The type locality is Ethiopia. The Abyssinian ground hornbill is now placed in the genus Bucorvus that was introduced, originally as a subgenus, by the French naturalist René Lesson in 1830. The species is monotypic. The generic name is derived from the name of the genus Buceros introduced by Carl Linnaeus in 1758 for the Asian hornbills where corvus is the Latin word for a "raven".
Description
The Abyssinian ground hornbill is a large, terrestrial hornbill with black body feathers and white primary feathers which are visible in flight.
“Abyssinian ground hornbill” enters the record as species of bird. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Abyssinian, ground and hornbill can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q480086. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1780, 1783, 1830 and 1758.
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This entry incorporates text from “Abyssinian ground hornbill” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.