turacos

A little beyond the last post of the company, Le Vaillant, having entered a district peopled by thousands of "turacos," and other rare birds, pitched his hunting camp; but his plans were terribly upset by the continuous fall of heavy rains, the result of which was to reduce the travellers to great straits for want of food.

Celebrated Travels and Travellers Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century Jules Verne 1866

Predictably, I cannot help but find the idea that condors, caracaras, turacos and hoatzins are all close kin of phorusrhacids highly appealing, but it does all seem very vague and sadly lacking in good character support.

Archive 2006-11-01 Darren Naish 2006

Their most exciting conclusion was that rampant convergence had occurred between these two parallel radiations: metavians include hoatzins, mesites and grebes, while coronavians include turacos, passerines and divers, for example (if those lists are lost on you, hoatzins are similar to touracos, mesites are similar to some passerines, and grebes are similar to divers).

Goodbye, my giant predatory, cursorial, flightless hoatzin Darren Naish 2006

This is also true of turacos and some cuckoos (indeed, many ornithologists have proposed that hoatzins might be close allies of turacos and/or cuckoos).

Archive 2006-11-01 Darren Naish 2006

We saw above that hoatzins have often been linked with turacos, and that turacos share with hoatzins and seriemas that unusual and distinctive robust, bowed third metacarpal, as well as other characters.

Archive 2006-11-01 Darren Naish 2006

It may perhaps involve turacos, and perhaps also falcons.

Goodbye, my giant predatory, cursorial, flightless hoatzin Darren Naish 2006

We saw above that hoatzins have often been linked with turacos, and that turacos share with hoatzins and seriemas that unusual and distinctive robust, bowed third metacarpal, as well as other characters.

Giant hoatzins of doom Darren Naish 2006

The idea that the hoatzin is not close to seriemas or turacos, but is in fact a member of a hitherto-overlooked metavian clade at the base of Neoaves is an exciting one, mostly because it would make this bird strongly convergent on the coronavian turacos.

Archive 2006-11-01 Darren Naish 2006

Hoatzins and seriemas also possess a few bony and soft-tissue characters that are shared only by these birds, turacos and cuckoos: these include details of the hip musculature and the presence of distinctive bony recesses on the top of the pelvis.

Giant hoatzins of doom Darren Naish 2006

In what might be regarded as a deviant version of the South American landbird group theory, Chandler (1997) proposed that turacos were the sister-taxon to Cariamae.

Giant hoatzins of doom Darren Naish 2006