Spix's Macaw - Taxonomy

Taxonomy

Spix's Macaw is the only known species of the genus Cyanopsitta. The genus name is derived from the Latin cyano and psitta (a shortened form of psittacus), which are in turn are derived from the Ancient Greek kuanos meaning "blue" and psittakos meaning "parrot". The species name spixii is a Latinized word derived form of the surname "Spix", hence Cyanopsitta spixii means "blue parrot of Spix". The genus Cyanopsitta is one of six genera of Central and South American macaws in the tribe Arini, which also includes all the other long-tailed New World parrots. Tribe Arini together the Amazonian parrots and a few miscellaneous genera make up subfamily Arinae of Neotropical parrots in family Psittacidae of true parrots.

In 1638 Georg Marcgrave was the first European naturalist to observe and describe the species; however, it is named for Johann Baptist von Spix, who collected the type specimen in May 1819 in Brazil, but misidentified it as a Hyacinth Macaw. Spix's mistake was noticed in 1832 by German professor of zoology Johann Wagler, who realized that the 1819 specimen was smaller and a different color than the Hyacinth Macaw and he designated the new species as "Sittace spixii". It wasn't until 1854 that naturalist Prince Charles Bonaparte properly placed it in its own genus, designating the bird Cyanopsitta spixi, based on important morphological differences between it and the other blue macaws. It was listed as Cyanopsittacus spixi by Italian zoologist Tommaso Salvadori in his 1891 Catalog of the Birds in the British Museum.

Naturalists have noted the Spix similarity to other smaller members of tribe Arini based on general morphology as long ago as Rev. F.G. Dutton, president of the Avicultural Society U.K. in 1900: "it's more like a conure".;('conure' is not a defined taxon - in Dutton's time, it referred to the archaic genus Conurus; today those would be among the smaller non-macaw parakeets in Arini). Brazilian ornithologist Helmut Sick stated in 1981: "Cyanopsitta spixii...is not a real macaw". (Sick's remark was in the context of an article on Lear's Macaw, a larger blue macaw. He recognized, as Spix had not 150 years before, that C. spixii is notably different from the larger macaws).

The morphology-based taxonomy of C. spixii, intermediate between the macaws and the smaller Arini, has been confirmed by recent molecular phylogenetic studies. In a 2008 molecular phylogenetic study of 69 parrot genera, the clade diagrams indicate that C. spixii split from the ancestral parakeets before the differentiation of the modern macaws. However, not all of the macaw genera were represented in the study. The study also states that diversification of the Neotropical parrot lineages occurred starting 33 mya, a period roughly coinciding with the separation of South America from West Antarctica. The author notes that the study challenges the classifications of British ornithologists Nigel Collar and Ian Rowley in the encyclopedic Handbook of the Birds of the World, volume 4 (1997). A 2011 study by the same authors which includes key genera of macaws further elucidates the macaw taxonomy: the clade diagram of that study places C. spixii in a clade including the macaw genera which is sister to a clade containing the Aratingas and other smaller parakeets. Within the macaw clade, C. spixii was the first taxon to diverge from the ancestral macaws; its nearest relatives are the Red-bellied Macaw (Orthopsittaca manilata) and the Blue-headed Macaw (Primolius couloni).