The Eurylaimidae are a family of

suboscine The Tyranni (suboscines) are a suborder of passerine birds that includes more than 1,000 species, a large majority of which are South American. It is named after the type genus '' Tyrannus''. These have a different anatomy of the syrinx musculat ...

passerine A passerine () is any bird of the order Passeriformes (; from Latin 'sparrow' and '-shaped') which includes more than half of all bird species. Sometimes known as perching birds, passerines generally have an anisodactyl arrangement of their ...

birds that occur from the eastern

Himalayas The Himalayas, or Himalaya ( ), is a mountain range in Asia, separating the plains of the Indian subcontinent from the Tibetan Plateau. The range has some of the Earth's highest peaks, including the highest, Mount Everest. More than list of h ...

Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania, between the Indian Ocean, Indian and Pacific Ocean, Pacific oceans. Comprising over List of islands of Indonesia, 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, ...

and the

Philippines The Philippines, officially the Republic of the Philippines, is an Archipelagic state, archipelagic country in Southeast Asia. Located in the western Pacific Ocean, it consists of List of islands of the Philippines, 7,641 islands, with a tot ...

. The family previously included the

sapayoa The sapayoa or broad-billed sapayoa (''Sapayoa aenigma'') is a suboscine passerine bird found Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama. Taxonomy and systematics As the sapayoa's specific epithet ''aenigma'' ("the enigma") implies, its relationships ha ...

from the

Neotropics The Neotropical realm is one of the eight biogeographic realms constituting Earth's land surface. Physically, it includes the tropical terrestrial ecoregions of the Americas and the entire South American temperate zone. Definition In biogeog ...

, the asities from

Madagascar Madagascar, officially the Republic of Madagascar, is an island country that includes the island of Madagascar and numerous smaller peripheral islands. Lying off the southeastern coast of Africa, it is the world's List of islands by area, f ...

, and the

Calyptomenidae Calyptomenidae is a family of passerine birds found in Africa, the Malay Peninsula and Borneo. There are six species in two genera. The species in this family were formerly included in the broadbill family Eurylaimidae The Eurylaimidae are a ...

from Africa and Asia, but these are now separated into distinct families.

Description

Many of the species are brightly coloured birds that present broad heads, large eyes and a hooked, flat and broad beak. They range from 13 to 28 centimetres in length, and live in the dense canopies of wet forests, allowing them to hide despite their brightly coloured plumage. The plumage of the juvenile eurylaimids are similar to those of the adults, differing in being duller and shorter-winged and shorter-tailed in some cases.

Behaviour and ecology

They are for the most part insectivorous and carnivorous. Prey taken includes

insect Insects (from Latin ') are Hexapoda, hexapod invertebrates of the class (biology), class Insecta. They are the largest group within the arthropod phylum. Insects have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body (Insect morphology#Head, head, ...

spider Spiders (order (biology), order Araneae) are air-breathing arthropods that have eight limbs, chelicerae with fangs generally able to inject venom, and spinnerets that extrude spider silk, silk. They are the largest order of arachnids and ran ...

centipede Centipedes (from Neo-Latin , "hundred", and Latin , "foot") are predatory arthropods belonging to the class Chilopoda (Ancient Greek , ''kheilos'', "lip", and Neo-Latin suffix , "foot", describing the forcipules) of the subphylum Myriapoda, ...

s, and

millipede Millipedes (originating from the Latin , "thousand", and , "foot") are a group of arthropods that are characterised by having two pairs of jointed legs on most body segments; they are known scientifically as the class Diplopoda, the name derive ...

s, as well as

lizard Lizard is the common name used for all Squamata, squamate reptiles other than snakes (and to a lesser extent amphisbaenians), encompassing over 7,000 species, ranging across all continents except Antarctica, as well as most Island#Oceanic isla ...

s and

tree frog A tree frog (or treefrog) is any species of frog that spends a major portion of its lifespan in trees, known as an arboreal state. Several lineages of frogs among the Neobatrachia suborder have given rise to treefrogs, although they are not clos ...

s. Prey is obtained by sallying from a perch to snatch it in flight, and gleaning the prey off leaves and branches while flying. Some species may take some fruit, but only the green broadbills of the genus '' Calyptomena'' and the

Grauer's broadbill Grauer's broadbill (''Pseudocalyptomena graueri''), also known as the African green broadbill, is a species of bird in the family Eurylaimidae, and is monotypic within the genus ''Pseudocalyptomena''. Its name commemorates the German zoologist R ...

are primarily frugivores (which also take some insects). They are generally gregarious, with many species moving about in flocks of about 20 individuals. They attach their purse-shaped nests to suspended vines, and leave a tail of fibres hanging below it. This gives the nest the appearance of being random debris caught in the tree, an effect further enhanced by the birds covering the nest with lichen and spider webs. Broadbills typically lay two to three eggs.

Taxonomy and systematics

The family Eurylaimidae was introduced in 1831 (as Eurylaimes) by the French naturalist

René Lesson René Primevère Lesson (20 March 1794 – 28 April 1849) was a French surgery, surgeon, natural history, naturalist, ornithologist, and herpetologist. Biography Lesson was born at Rochefort, Charente-Maritime, Rochefort, and entered the Naval ...

. They were characterized by a simple syrinx with just a single pair of muscles, the front toes being partially fused at the base and having 15 neck vertebrae. A DNA sequence-based study by Carl Oliveros and colleagues published in 2019 determined the phylogenetic relationships of the Eurylaimidae to other families in the

Eurylaimides Eurylaimides (Old World suboscines) is a clade of passerine birds that are distributed in tropical regions around the Indian Ocean and a single American species, the sapayoa. This group is divided into five families. The families listed here are ...

(Old World suboscines): A study published in 2017 determined the following phylogenetic relationships among the Eurylaimidae: The family includes ten species of which four are each placed in their own

monotypic In biology, a monotypic taxon is a taxonomic group (taxon) that contains only one immediately subordinate taxon. A monotypic species is one that does not include subspecies or smaller, infraspecific taxa. In the case of genera, the term "unisp ...

genus:

Notes

References

External links

Broadbill videos
on the Internet Bird Collection {{Authority control Tyranni Bird families Taxa named by René Lesson