''Touit'' is a genus of

Neotropical 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 biogeogra ...

parrot Parrots (Psittaciformes), also known as psittacines (), are birds with a strong curved beak, upright stance, and clawed feet. They are classified in four families that contain roughly 410 species in 101 genus (biology), genera, found mostly in ...

s in the family

Psittacidae The Family (biology), family Psittacidae or holotropical parrots is one of three families of true parrots. It comprises the 12 species of subfamily Psittacinae (the Afrotropics, Afrotropical parrots) and 167 of subfamily Arinae (the New World or ...

. The genus was introduced by the English zoologist

George Robert Gray George Robert Gray (8 July 1808 – 6 May 1872) was an English zoology, zoologist and author, and head of the Ornithology, ornithological section of the British Museum, now the Natural History Museum, London, Natural History Museum, London f ...

in 1855 with the scarlet-shouldered parrotlet (''Touit huetii'') as the

type species In International_Code_of_Zoological_Nomenclature, 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 spe ...

. The genus name is derived from the extinct

Tupi language Old Tupi, Ancient Tupi or Classical Tupi () is a classical Tupian language which was spoken by the indigenous Tupi people of Brazil, mostly those who inhabited coastal regions in South and Southeast Brazil. In the words of Brazilian tupinol ...

that was spoken by native people in Brazil: ''Tuí eté'' means "really little parrot". In 1648 the German naturalist Georg Marcgrave used ''Tuiete'' for a small parrot in his ''

Historia Naturalis Brasiliae ''Historia Naturalis Brasiliae'' (), originally written in Latin, is the first scientific work on the natural history of Brazil, written by Dutch people, Dutch naturalist Willem Piso and containing research done by the German scientist Georg Ma ...

''. The genus contains the following eight species:

References

External links

* Psittacidae Bird genera Taxa named by George Robert Gray Taxonomy articles created by Polbot {{parrot-stub