Taxonomy
The Hoopoe is classified in the Coraciiformes clade, a group that also includes kingfishers, bee-eaters, rollers, and woodhoopoes (forming a clade with this one according to Hackett et al. (2008)). A close relationship between the Hoopoe and the woodhoopoes is also supported by the shared and unique nature of their stapes. In the Sibley-Ahlquist taxonomy, the Hoopoe is separated from the Coraciiformes as a separate order, the Upupiformes. Some authorities place the woodhoopoes in the Upupiformes as well.
The fossil record of the hoopoes is very incomplete, with the earliest fossil coming from the Quaternary. The fossil record of their relatives is older, with fossil woodhoopoes dating back to the Miocene and those of an extinct related family, the Messelirrisoridae, dating from the Eocene.
It is the only extant member of its family, although some treatments consider some of the subspecies as separate species. Several authors have separated the Madagascan subspecies (U. e. marginata) as a separate species, and also the resident African form U. e. africana. The morphological differences between the most commonly split subspecies, U. e. marginata, and the other subspecies are minor, and only U. e. marginata has distinctly different vocalisations. One accepted separate species, the Giant Hoopoe, U. antaios, lived on the island of St Helena but became extinct in the sixteenth century, presumably due to introduced species.
The genus Upupa was created by Linnaeus in his Systema naturae in 1758. It then included three other species with long curved bills:
- U. eremita (now Geronticus eremita), the Northern Bald Ibis
- U. pyrrhocorax (now Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax), the Red-billed Chough
- U. paradisea
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