Velvety black tyrant
species of bird
The velvety black tyrant (Knipolegus nigerrimus) is a species of bird in the family Tyrannidae, the tyrant flycatchers. It is endemic to Brazil.
Taxonomy and systematics
The velvety black tyrant was formally described in 1818 as Muscicapa nigerrima, placing it in the Old World flycatcher family. It was later transferred to genus Knipolegus, which was erected in 1826 with the blue-billed black tyrant (K. cyanirostris) as the type species.
The velvety black tyrant's taxonomy is unsettled. The IOC and BirdLife International's Handbook of the Birds of the World assign it two subspecies, the nominate M. n. nigerrimus (Vieillot, 1818) and M. n. hoflingae (Frederico Lencioni-Neto, 1996). The Clements taxonomy does not recognize hoflingae, treating the species as monotypic.
This article follows the two-subspecies model.
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This entry incorporates text from “Velvety black tyrant” 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.