The Jamaican red macaw (''Ara gossei'') is a

hypothetical A hypothesis (plural hypotheses) is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. For a hypothesis to be a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it. Scientists generally base scientific hypotheses on previous obser ...

species of

parrot Parrots, also known as psittacines (), are birds of the roughly 398 species in 92 genera comprising the order Psittaciformes (), found mostly in tropical and subtropical regions. The order is subdivided into three superfamilies: the Psittacoide ...

in the family

Psittacidae The family Psittacidae or holotropical parrots is one of three families of true parrots. It comprises the roughly 10 species of subfamily Psittacinae (the Old World or Afrotropical parrots) and 157 of subfamily Arinae (the New World or Neotropi ...

that lived on

Jamaica Jamaica (; ) is an island country situated in the Caribbean Sea. Spanning in area, it is the third-largest island of the Greater Antilles and the Caribbean (after Cuba and Hispaniola). Jamaica lies about south of Cuba, and west of His ...

History

The only reported specimen was shot on Jamaica around 1765, and was later seen by a Dr. Robertson when it was stuffed; the specimen has since been lost. Robertson sent a description of it to

Philip Henry Gosse Philip Henry Gosse FRS (; 6 April 1810 – 23 August 1888), known to his friends as Henry, was an English naturalist and populariser of natural science, an early improver of the seawater aquarium, and a painstaking innovator in the study of ma ...

, who published his own description in 1847: Robertson stated the bird had never been seen or figured before, and that it was very different from any macaw he had ever seen. One 1765 illustration is thought to depict this bird, but has also been suggested to be an imported Cuban macaw. The parrot was considered identical to the Cuban macaw by some 19th-century naturalists, but was given its own binomial by Rothschild in 1905.

References

External links

Ara (genus) Birds described in 1905 Controversial parrot taxa Extinct animals of Jamaica Extinct birds of the Caribbean Taxa named by Walter Rothschild Taxonomy articles created by Polbot Hypothetical extinct species Taxobox binomials not recognized by IUCN {{parrot-stub