The Rodrigues parrot was endemic to the Mascarene island of Rodrigues in the Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar. It was last mentioned in 1761, and probably became extinct soon after. It had a proportionally large head and beak and a long tail. Remains of the species have been discovered in caves on the Plaine Corail and in Caverne Tortue.
About Rodrigues parrot in brief
The Rodrigues parrot was endemic to the Mascarene island of Rodrigues in the Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar. The species is known from subfossil bones and from mentions in contemporary accounts. It was last mentioned in 1761, and probably became extinct soon after, perhaps due to a combination of predation by rats, deforestation, and hunting by humans. It had a proportionally large head and beak and a long tail. Its exact size is unknown, but it may have been around 50 cm long. It may have looked similar to the great-billed parrot. By the time it was discovered, it frequented and nested on islets off southern Rodrigues, where introduced rats were absent, and fed on the seeds of the shrub Fernelia buxifolia. The current whereabouts of the holotype beak are unknown. Remains of the species have been discovered in caves on the Plaine Corail and in Caverne Tortue. It is unclear to which other species it is most closely related, but is classified as a member of the tribe Psittaculini, along with other Mascrene parrots. The specific name refers to the island, which is itself named after the discoverer of the island,.
the Portuguese navigator Diogo Rodrigues. The name is derived from the Greek words nekros, which means dead, and psittakos, parrot, in reference to the bird being extinct. In 1875, A. Newton analysed Julien Tafforet’s then newly rediscovered account, and identified a description of the RodriguesParrot. In a footnote in an 1891 edition of Leguat’s memoir, the English writer Pasfield Oliver doubted that the parrots mentioned were the Rodrigue parrots, due to their smaller size. Julian Hume suggested in 2007 that the same sentence could be interpreted as both green and blue parrots in the same English palaeontologist. Although the most extinct species of parrot is the dodo, Hume has proposed that this may be the case for all parrots as well as some of the less isolated islands of the Pleistocene, so it was possible for the species to colonise during the lower Sea levels of the Middle East. In 2014, the IOC World Bird List changed the specific name to rodricanus by the IOC to reflect the name used in the literature henceforward, but the spelling of the bird was changed back to rodericanus by IOC WorldBird List.
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This page is based on the article Rodrigues parrot published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 06, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
