Large Cactus Finch - Taxonomy and Systematics

Taxonomy and Systematics

The Large Cactus Finch is one of Darwin's finches, a group of closely related birds which evolved on the Galápagos Islands. The group is related to the Tiaris grassquits, which are found in South America and the Caribbean. An ancestral relative of those grassquits arrived on the Galápagos Islands some 2–3 million years ago, and the Large Cactus Finch is one of the species which evolved from that ancestor. There are three subspecies:

• G. c. conirostris is found on the island of Española.
• G. c. darwinii is found on the islands of Darwin and Wolf.
• G. c. propinqua is found on the island of Genovesa.

First described by Robert Ridgway in 1890, the Large Cactus Finch is one of six species the genus Geospiza. The name Geospiza is a combination of the Greek words geo-, meaning "ground-" and spiza, meaning finch. The specific name conirostris comes from the Latin conus, meaning "cone" and rostris, meaning "-billed" (rostrum = bill). Although this species was originally described as a finch, DNA research has now shown that all of Darwin's "finches" are actually tanagers.