Grey peacock-pheasant
species of bird
The grey peacock-pheasant (Polyplectron bicalcaratum), also known as Burmese peacock-pheasant, is a large Asian member of the order Galliformes.
Taxonomy
In 1747 the English naturalist George Edwards included an illustration and a description of the grey peacock-pheasant in the second volume of his A Natural History of Uncommon Birds. He used the English name "The Peacock Pheasant from China". Edwards based his hand-coloured etching on a live bird which was given to Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford. When in 1758 the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus updated his Systema Naturae for the tenth edition, he placed the grey peacock-pheasant with the Indian peafowl in the genus Pavo. Linnaeus included a brief description, coined the binomial name Pavo bicalcaratum and cited Edwards' work. The grey peacock-pheasant is now placed in the genus Polyplectron that was introduced in 1807 by the Dutch zoologist Coenraad Jacob Temminck. The genus name Polyplectron combines the Ancient Greek polus meaning "many" with plēktron meaning "cock's spur". The specific epithet bicalcaratum combines the Latin bi meaning "two" with calcar, calcaris meaning "spur".
Although several subspecies have been described, none are currently recognised in the list of world birds maintained by Frank Gill, Pamela Rasmussen and David Donsker on behalf of the International Ornithological Committee (IOC).
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This entry incorporates text from “Grey peacock-pheasant” 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.