Broad-billed Parrot - Taxonomy

Taxonomy

The earliest known descriptions of the Broad-billed Parrot were provided by Dutch travellers during the Second Dutch Expedition to Indonesia, led by Admiral Jacob Cornelis van Neck in 1598. They appear in reports published in 1601, which also contain the first illustration of the bird, along with the first of a Dodo. The Dutch sailors who visited Mauritius categorised the Broad-billed Parrots separately from parrots, and referred to them as "Indische Ravens" (translated as either "Indian Ravens" or "Indian Crows"), which caused confusion when their journals were studied. The English naturalist Hugh Edwin Strickland assigned them to the hornbill genus Buceros, because he interpreted the projection on the forehead in a basic illustration as a horn. The Dutch and the French also referred to South American macaws as "Indian Ravens" during the 17th century, and the name was even used for hornbills by Dutch, French, and English speakers in the East Indies. Sir Thomas Herbert referred to the Broad-billed Parrot as "Cacatoes" (Cockatoo) in 1634, with the description "birds like Parrats, fierce and indomitable", but naturalists did not realise that he was referring to the same bird. Even after subfossils of a parrot matching the descriptions were found, French zoologist Emile Oustalet argued that the "Indian Raven" was a hornbill whose remains awaited discovery. France Staub was in favour of this idea as late as 1993. No remains of hornbills have ever been found on the island, and apart from an extinct species from New Caledonia, hornbills are not found on any oceanic islands.

The first known physical remains of the Broad-billed Parrot were a subfossil mandible collected along with the first batch of Dodo bones found in the Mare aux Songes swamp. Richard Owen described the mandible in 1866 and identified it as belonging to a large parrot species, to which he gave the binomial name Psittacus mauritianus and the common name "Broad-billed Parrot". In 1868, shortly after the 1601 journal of the Dutch East India Company ship Gelderland had been rediscovered, Hermann Schlegel examined an unlabelled pen-and-ink sketch in it. Realising that the drawing, which is attributed to the artist Joris Joostensz Laerle, depicted the parrot described by Owen, Schlegel made the connection with the old journal descriptions. In 1875, because its bones and crest are significantly different from those of Psittacus species, Alfred Newton assigned it to its own genus, which he called Lophopsittacus. Lophos is the Ancient Greek word for crest, referring here to the bird's frontal crest, and psittakos is Ancient Greek for parrot.