Bernieridae
family of birds
The tetrakas, also known as the Malagasy warblers, are a recently validated family of songbirds. They were formally named Bernieridae in 2010. The family currently consists of eleven species (in eight genera) of small forest birds. These birds are all endemic to Madagascar.
In 1934, the monophyly of this group was proposed by Finn Salomonsen but the traditional assignments of these birds were maintained, mistaken by their convergent evolution and the lack of dedicated research. The families to which the Malagasy warblers were formerly assigned—Pycnonotidae and even more so Timaliidae and Sylviidae—were used as "wastebin taxa", uniting unrelated lineages that were somewhat similar ecologically and morphologically.
It was not until the analysis of mtDNA cytochrome b and 16S rRNA as well as nDNA RAG-1 and RAG-2 exon sequence data, that the long-proposed grouping was accepted.
Taxonomy and systematics
The family contains 11 species divided into 8 genera.
The first phylogeny of the Bernieridae to include all eleven recognized species was performed by Younger et al. 2019:
Notably, this phylogeny suggests that the genus Xanthomixis is paraphyletic, with X. tenebrosa more closely related to Crossleyia xanthophrys than to the other members of Xanthomixis.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bernieridae” 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.