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Yellow-breasted crake

species of bird

Specimen drawers, botanical folios and brass scientific instruments under study light
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 5, 2026
Entity authorityQ929942 ↗
Source-derived summary

The yellow-breasted crake (Laterallus flaviventer) is a species of bird in the subfamily Rallinae of family Rallidae, the rails, gallinules, and coots. It is found on several Caribbean islands and in most of Central America and South America.

Taxonomy and systematics

The yellow-breasted crake was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1781 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux. The bird was also illustrated in a hand-colored plate engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet in the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle which was produced under the supervision of Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text. Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial name Rallus flaviventer in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées. The yellow-breasted crake was next placed in the genus Porzana and was erected by the French ornithologist Louis Pierre Vieillot in 1816. That generic name is the Venetian word for the small crakes. The specific epithet combines the Latin flavus meaning "yellow" with venter meaning "belly".

However, the yellow-breasted crake's taxonomy has not been resolved. It was formerly sometimes placed in the obsolete genus Poliolimnas or united with the Ocellated crake in Micropygia.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Yellow-breasted crake” is species of bird. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Yellow-breasted, crake and species, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA sound reference starting point where classification, measurement and the date of the underlying evidence remain visible. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1781, 1783, 1816—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Yellow-breasted, crake and species is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “species of bird” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q929942. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1781, 1783 and 1816.

Critical limits

Current terminology should not be projected backward without checking the classification used when the underlying evidence was created. 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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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Yellow-breasted crake” 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.