Greater Antillean bullfinch
species of bird
The Greater Antillean bullfinch (Melopyrrha violacea) is a species of bird in the family Thraupidae, the tanagers and allies. It is found in the Bahamas, Hispaniola (the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and their offshore islands), Jamaica, and the Turks and Caicos Islands.
Taxonomy and systematics
The Greater Antillean bullfinch has a complicated taxonomic history. It was formally described by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in 1758 in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae under the binomial name Loxia violacea. The specific epithet violacea is from Latin violaceus meaning "violet-colored". Linnaeus based his description on "The Purple Gross-beak" that had been described and illustrated by Mark Catesby in 1731. The type locality is the Bahamas. The species was later placed in the genus Loxigilla.
A molecular phylogenetic study published in 2014 found that Loxigilla was polyphyletic and in the subsequent rearrangement, by 2020 most taxonomic systems had moved the Greater Antillean bullfinch and the Puerto Rican bullfinch to Melopyrrha. In 2016 BirdLife International's Handbook of the Birds of the World (HBW) had moved the two species to genus Pyrrhulagra but in 2022 moved them to Melopyrrha.
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This entry incorporates text from “Greater Antillean bullfinch” 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.