Microcarbo
genus of birds
Microcarbo is a genus of fish-eating birds, known as cormorants, of the family Phalacrocoracidae. The genus was formerly subsumed within Phalacrocorax.
Microcarbo has been recognized as a valid genus by the IOC's World Bird List on the basis of work by Siegel-Causey (1988), Kennedy et al. (2000), and Christidis and Boles (2008).
As suggested by the name, this genus contains the smallest of the world's cormorants. It is also sister to all other cormorants, having diverged from the rest of the family between 12.8 and 15.4 million years ago.
Taxonomy
The genus Microcarbo was introduced in 1856 by the French naturalist Charles Lucien Bonaparte with the pygmy cormorant as the type species. The name combines the Ancient Greek mikros meaning "small" with the genus name Carbo that was introduced by Bernard Germain de Lacépède in 1789.
The genus contains five species.
List of species
†Serventys' cormorant, Microcarbo serventyorum
References
Christidis, L., and W. E. Boles.
“Microcarbo” enters the record as genus of birds. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Microcarbo, genus and birds can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Microcarbo” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Microcarbo, genus and birds provides the most credible route into that argument.
Stable identifiers, scientific names and standards terminology offer the best bridge between this overview and specialist evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q128189. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1988, 2000, 2008 and 1856.
Scientific names, classifications and consensus can change while older terminology persists in catalogues and historical literature. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Microcarbo” 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.