''Microcarbo'' is a genus of fish-eating

bird Birds are a group of warm-blooded vertebrates constituting the class Aves (), characterised by feathers, toothless beaked jaws, the laying of hard-shelled eggs, a high metabolic rate, a four-chambered heart, and a strong yet lightweig ...

s, known as cormorants, of the family

Phalacrocoracidae Phalacrocoracidae is a family of approximately 40 species of aquatic birds commonly known as cormorants and shags. Several different classifications of the family have been proposed, but in 2021 the IOC adopted a consensus taxonomy of seven gen ...

. The genus was formerly subsumed within '' Phalacrocorax''. ''Microcarbo'' has been recognized as a valid genus by the IOC's World Bird List on the basis of work by Siegel-Causey (1988), Kennedy et al. (2000), and Christidis and Boles (2008). As suggested by the name, this genus contains the smallest of the world's cormorants. It is also the most basal, having diverged from the rest of the family between 12.8 to 15.4 million years ago.

Taxonomy

The genus ''Microcarbo'' was introduced in 1856 by the French naturalist Charles Lucien Bonaparte with the

pygmy cormorant The pygmy cormorant (''Microcarbo pygmaeus'') is a member of the Phalacrocoracidae (cormorant) family of seabirds. It breeds in south-eastern Europe and south-western Asia. It is partially migratory, with northern populations wintering further ...

as the

type species In zoological nomenclature, a type species (''species typica'') is the species name with which the name of a genus or subgenus is considered to be permanently taxonomically associated, i.e., the species that contains the biological type specime ...

. The name combines the

Ancient Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic p ...

''mikros'' meaning "small" with the genus name ''Carbo'' that was introduced by Bernard Germain de Lacépède in 1789. The genus contains five species.

List of species

*†Serventys' cormorant, '' Microcarbo serventyorum''

References

*Christidis, L., and W. E. Boles. 2008. ''Systematics and taxonomy of Australian birds''. CSIRO Publishing, Collingwood, Victoria, Australia. *Kennedy, M., R. D. Gray, and H. G. Spencer. 2000. The phylogenetic relationships of the shags and cormorants: can sequence data resolve a disagreement between behavior and morphology? Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 17: 345–359. *Siegel-Causey, D. 1988. Phylogeny of the Phalacrocoracidae. Condor 90: 885–905. Available a

(Accessed 13 May 2010). {{Taxonbar, from=Q128189 Microcarbo, Bird genera Taxa named by Charles Lucien Bonaparte