Coraciimorphae is a
clade
In biology, a clade (), also known as a Monophyly, monophyletic group or natural group, is a group of organisms that is composed of a common ancestor and all of its descendants. Clades are the fundamental unit of cladistics, a modern approach t ...
of birds that contains the order
Coliiformes
The mousebirds are birds in the order Coliiformes. They are the sister group to the clade Cavitaves, which includes the Leptosomiformes (the cuckoo roller), Trogoniformes ( trogons), Bucerotiformes ( hornbills and hoopoes), Piciformes ( wo ...
(mousebirds) and the clade
Cavitaves
Cavitaves is a clade that contains the order Leptosomiformes (cuckoo roller) and the clade Eucavitaves (a large assemblage of birds that includes woodpeckers, kingfishers and trogons).Naish, D. (2012). "Birds." Pp. 379–423 in Brett-Surman, M ...
(a large assemblage of birds that includes
woodpecker
Woodpeckers are part of the bird family (biology), family Picidae, which also includes the piculets, wrynecks and sapsuckers. Members of this family are found worldwide, except for Australia, New Guinea, New Zealand, Madagascar and the extreme ...
s,
kingfisher
Kingfishers are a family, the Alcedinidae, of small to medium-sized, brightly coloured birds in the order Coraciiformes. They have a cosmopolitan distribution, with most species living in the tropical regions of Africa, Asia, and Oceania, ...
s and
trogons).
[Naish, D. (2012). "Birds." Pp. 379–423 in Brett-Surman, M.K., Holtz, T.R., and Farlow, J. O. (eds.), ''The Complete Dinosaur (Second Edition)''. Indiana University Press (Bloomington & Indianapolis).] The name however was coined in the 1990s by
Sibley and Ahlquist based on their
DNA-DNA hybridization studies conducted in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. However their Coraciimorphae only contains
Trogoniformes and
Coraciiformes
The Coraciiformes are a group of usually colourful birds including the kingfishers, the bee-eaters, the rollers, the motmots, and the todies. They generally have syndactyly, with three forward-pointing toes (and toes 3 & 4 fused at their b ...
. Coraciimorphae was defined in the ''
PhyloCode
The ''International Code of Phylogenetic Nomenclature'', known as the ''PhyloCode'' for short, is a formal set of rules governing phylogenetic nomenclature. Its current version is specifically designed to regulate the naming of clades, leaving the ...
'' by George Sangster and colleagues in 2022 as "the least inclusive crown clade containing ''
Colius colius'' and ''
Picus viridis'', but not ''
Accipiter nisus
The Eurasian sparrowhawk (''Accipiter nisus''), also known as the northern sparrowhawk or simply the sparrowhawk, is a small bird of prey in the family Accipitridae. Adult male Eurasian sparrowhawks have bluish grey upperparts and orange-barred ...
'' or ''
Passer domesticus
The house sparrow (''Passer domesticus'') is a bird of the sparrow family Passeridae, found in most parts of the world. It is a small bird that has a typical length of and a mass of . Females and young birds are coloured pale brown and grey, ...
''".
Taxonomy
Cladogram
A cladogram (from Greek language, Greek ''clados'' "branch" and ''gramma'' "character") is a diagram used in cladistics to show relations among organisms. A cladogram is not, however, an Phylogenetic tree, evolutionary tree because it does not s ...
of Coraciimorphae relationships based on Jarvis, E.D. ''et al.'' (2014)
with some clade names after Yuri, T. ''et al.'' (2013).
References
Neognathae
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