Bombycilloidea is a superfamily of passerine birds that contains ten living species. They are found in

North North is one of the four compass points or cardinal directions. It is the opposite of south and is perpendicular to east and west. ''North'' is a noun, adjective, or adverb indicating direction or geography. Etymology The word ''no ...

Central America Central America ( es, América Central or ) is a subregion of the Americas. Its boundaries are defined as bordering the United States to the north, Colombia to the south, the Caribbean Sea to the east, and the Pacific Ocean to the west. ...

, most of the

Palearctic The Palearctic or Palaearctic is the largest of the eight biogeographic realms of the Earth. It stretches across all of Eurasia north of the foothills of the Himalayas, and North Africa. The realm consists of several bioregions: the Euro-Si ...

, the Arabian Peninsula, the islands of

Hispaniola Hispaniola (, also ; es, La Española; Latin and french: Hispaniola; ht, Ispayola; tnq, Ayiti or Quisqueya) is an island in the Caribbean that is part of the Greater Antilles. Hispaniola is the most populous island in the West Indies, and t ...

and Sulawesi, and formerly the

Hawaiian Islands The Hawaiian Islands ( haw, Nā Mokupuni o Hawai‘i) are an archipelago of eight major islands, several atolls, and numerous smaller islets in the North Pacific Ocean, extending some from the island of Hawaii in the south to northernmost ...

Taxonomy

The superfamily includes only ten extant species. It is

sister A sister is a woman or a girl who shares one or more parents with another individual; a female sibling. The male counterpart is a brother. Although the term typically refers to a familial relationship, it is sometimes used endearingly to refer to ...

to a clade containing Muscicapoidea, Certhoidea and Regulidae (both clades are contained within the

parvorder Order ( la, ordo) is one of the eight major hierarchical taxonomic ranks in Linnaean taxonomy. It is classified between family and class. In biological classification, the order is a taxonomic rank used in the classification of organisms and ...

Muscicapida), from which it diverged during the mid-late

Oligocene The Oligocene ( ) is a geologic epoch of the Paleogene Period and extends from about 33.9 million to 23 million years before the present ( to ). As with other older geologic periods, the rock beds that define the epoch are well identified but ...

, about 25 million years ago. The common ancestor for both clades lived in Eurasia; at some point, the ancestral Bombycilloidea arrived in North America where they rapidly radiated into multiple families. One of these lineages moved back into Eurasia, where it gave rise to several lineages that stayed in Eurasia or colonized Wallacea or Hawaii. Two families, the

waxwing The waxwings are three species of passerine birds classified in the genus ''Bombycilla''. They are pinkish-brown and pale grey with distinctive smooth plumage in which many body feathers are not individually visible, a black and white eyestripe, ...

s (Bombycillidae) and silky-flycatchers (Ptiliogonatidae) contain several species and are widespread throughout the

Holarctic The Holarctic realm is a biogeographic realm that comprises the majority of habitats found throughout the continents in the Northern Hemisphere. It corresponds to the floristic Boreal Kingdom. It includes both the Nearctic zoogeographical regi ...

and North America respectively, but the others are monotypic (the hypocolius in Hypocoliidae), are restricted to a few islands (the extinct Hawaiian honeyeaters in Mohoidae), or both (the palmchat in Dulidae and the hylocitrea in Hylocitreidae). The most

basal Basal or basilar is a term meaning ''base'', ''bottom'', or ''minimum''. Science * Basal (anatomy), an anatomical term of location for features associated with the base of an organism or structure * Basal (medicine), a minimal level that is nec ...

extant family in Bombycilloidea is Dulidae, and the most derived are the Hypocoliidae and Mohoidae. Mohoidae is also notable for being the only known avian family to have gone extinct in recent times, with the last species, the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō (''Moho braccatus'') going extinct in 1987. The cladogram of the bombycilloids shown below is based on the analysis of Carl Oliveros and colleagues published in 2019.

References

{{wikispecies Bombycilloidea Bird superfamilies Passerida Extant Oligocene first appearances