Scaly spurfowl
species of bird
The scaly spurfowl (Pternistis squamatus) is a species of bird in the family Phasianidae. It is found in Angola, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Republic of the Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda, São Tomé and Príncipe, Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda.
Taxonomy
The scaly spurfowl was formally described in 1857 by the American ornithologist John Cassin from specimens collected by Paul Du Chaillu in the Cape Lopez region in what is now the West Africa state of Gabon. Cassin coined the binomial name Francolinus squamatus. The specific epithet squamatus is Latin for "scaled". The species is now placed in the genus Pternistis that was introduced by the German naturalist Johann Georg Wagler in 1832. A phylogenetic study published in 2019 found that the scaly spurfowl is a sister species to the Ahanta spurfowl.
Three subspecies are now recognised:
Pternistis squamatus squamatus (Cassin, 1857) — southeast Nigeria to north and east Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo), Gabon and the Republic of the Congo (R Congo)
Pternistis squamatus schuetti (Cabanis, 1880) — east R Congo to Uganda, central and southwest Kenya, and central Ethiopia.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q737923. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1857, 1832, 2019 and 1880.
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This entry incorporates text from “Scaly spurfowl” 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.