Taxonomy and Systematics
Due to a nomenclatorial dispute, the generic name Scops is not used by either the scops or the screech owls (which when only a few species were known were placed together), nor by any other animal. In 1760, Mathurin Jacques Brisson had established the genus Scopus for the hammerkop, a peculiar African bird. Paul Möhring in 1758 had already used the name Scops for this bird however, and believing this name to be valid Morten Thrane Brünnich replaced Scopus with it in 1772. The scops- and screech-owls, which were placed in Otus by Thomas Pennant in 1769 (as he too believed that Moehring's Scops was valid) were moved to Scops by Marie Jules César Savigny in 1809. Lorenz Oken in 1817 changed this to Scopus, also under the impression that Scops was the older name for the hammerkop, and valid.
However, the names established by Moehring pre-date the official start date of Linnean nomenclature in zoology as regulated by the ICZN, which is December 31, 1758 – the last day of the year in which the 10th edition of Linné's Systema Naturae was published. Hence, Scopus as established by Brisson is indeed the valid generic name of the hammerkop, and the first valid use of Scops was in 1772 by Brünnich – which according to modern rules of zoological nomenclature was unjustified however, as the name he believed to be reinstating had never been technically valid in the first place.
Read more about this topic: Scops Owls