The broad-billed parrot or raven parrot is a large extinct parrot in the family Psittaculidae. It was endemic to the Mascarene island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar. The bird’s head was large in proportion to its body, and there was a distinct crest of feathers on the front of the head. It became extinct in the 17th century owing to a combination of deforestation, predation by introduced invasive species, and probably hunting.
About Broad-billed parrot in brief
The broad-billed parrot or raven parrot is a large extinct parrot in the family Psittaculidae. It was endemic to the Mascarene island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar. The bird’s head was large in proportion to its body, and there was a distinct crest of feathers on the front of the head. It had a very large beak, comparable in size to that of the hyacinth macaw, which would have enabled it to crack hard seeds. It became extinct in the 17th century owing to a combination of deforestation, predation by introduced invasive species, and probably hunting as well. Only a few brief contemporary descriptions and three depictions are known. The species was first scientifically described from a subfossil mandible in 1866, but this was not linked to the old accounts until the rediscovery of a detailed 1601 sketch that matched both theSubfossils and the accounts. In 1875, the British zoologist Alfred Newton assigned it to its own genus, Lophopsacus, referring to the bird’s frontal crest, and psittos, which means Psittacus in Ancient Greek. The common name was first used by Richard Owen in a lecture in 1868, shortly after the 1601 journal of the Dutch East India Company ship, the Realist. The exact colouration is unknown, but a contemporary description indicates that it had multiple colours, including a blue head, and perhaps a red body and beak.
It is believed to have been a weak flier, but not flightless. The Dutch and the French also referred to South American macaws as ‘Indian ravens’ during the17th century, and the name was used for hornbills by Dutch, French, and English speakers in the East Indies. The first known physical remain of the broad- billed parrots was a sub fossilMandible collected along with the first batch of dodo bones found in the Mare aux Songes swamp. The British biologist Richard Owen described the mandible and identified it as belonging to a large parrot species, to which he gave the binomial name Psittus mauritianus. This holotype specimen is now lost. In the 1970s, the German ornithologist Geland Geland had examined an unlabelled pen-and-ink-and sketch in it and attributed it to the Dutch artist Jostens Laostens, which is the same as the parrot described by Owen in 1875. In 1973, the artist Joosten Joostens depicted the bird in a painting by Joris Josten Laosten, which he called Lophopos Laerzens, depicted in which the bird is depicted with a red crest on its head. This is the first time the bird has been shown to have had a crest of its own, and it may have been closely related to the Rodrigues parrot.
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This page is based on the article Broad-billed parrot published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 06, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
