Brown tinamou
species of bird
The brown tinamou (Crypturellus obsoletus) is a brownish ground bird found in humid lowland and montane forest in tropical and subtropical South America.
Taxonomy
All tinamous are usually treated in a single family (Tinamidae) and, contrary to traditional classifications, they are embedded within the group known as ratites, most closely related to the extinct moa of New Zealand. However, unlike ratites (ostriches, rheas, moa, kiwis, emus, cassowaries & elephantbirds), tinamous are capable of flight, although in general, they are not strong fliers. Different ratite lineages evolved separately from ancient flying birds, and tinamous are thought to most closely resemble these ancestral ratites.
Subspecies
Its distribution is highly disjunct and the subspecies, which quite probably represent more than one species, are distributed as follows:
C. o. obsoletus, the nominate race, occurs in the Atlantic forest in southeastern Brazil, eastern Paraguay and Misiones, Argentina.
C. o. griseiventris occurs throughout the valley of Rio Tapajós, Brazil; southwestern Pará, southeastern Amazonas, and central Mato Grosso.
C. o. hypochraceus occurs in upper Rio Madeira valley in central Rondônia, Brazil.
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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 Jul 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q843266. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Brown tinamou” 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.