African grey hornbill
species of bird
The African grey hornbill (Lophoceros nasutus) is a member of the hornbill family of mainly tropical near-passerine birds found in the Old World. It is a widespread resident breeder in much of sub-Saharan Africa and the southwest of the Arabian Peninsula. The African grey hornbill has escaped or been deliberately released into Florida, USA, but there is no evidence that the population is breeding and may only persist due to continuing releases or escapes.
Taxonomy
In 1760 the French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson included a description of the African grey hornbill in the fourth volume of his Ornithologie based on a specimen collected in Senegal. He used the French name Le calao à bec noir du Sénégal and the Latin name Hydrocorax Senegalensis Melanorynchos. Although Brisson coined Latin names, these do not conform to the binomial system and are not recognized by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. When in 1766 the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus updated his Systema Naturae for the twelfth edition he added 240 species that had been previously described by Brisson in his Ornithologie. Linnaeus included a terse description of the African grey hornbill, placed it with the other hornbills in the genus Buceros and coined the binomial name Buceros nasutus.
The African grey hornbill is now placed in the genus Lophoceros that was introduced in 1833 by two German naturalists, Wilhelm Hemprich and Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg. This genus was resurrected in 2013 to contain a group of hornbills that had previously been placed in the genus Tockus.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “African grey hornbill” as species of bird. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the science & nature register because the source frames it as species of bird. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The date and method of observation matter as much as the stated conclusion, especially where classification or consensus has changed. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 30, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q27074817. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1760, 1766, 1833 and 2013.
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This entry incorporates text from “African grey 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.