Evening all,
A colleague at the Royal Zoological Society emailed me the first page of a
paper due out soon on lumping all five Australian crow/raven species into one
species. Now, I know that lumps sometime happen, but having to take Australian
Raven, Little Raven and Torresian Crow off of my year and life lists seems a
bit excessive. The authors state that the morphological differences between the
five don't warrant full species status for each and their DNA work appears to
back it up.
As B-A doesn't do attachments, I've housed a copy of the first page (all
that's available at the moment) on my website if anyone's interested:
http://www.tonykeenebirds.co.uk/uni/JAvGen-advance-83474.pdf
Given that the IOC can often support splits or lumps from the evidence of a
single study, I would expect this one to be up for an IOC proposal soon.
I thought most research supported splitting everything these days, but I
wonder if we're going to see a reversal of this over the next few years, like
they did in the 1960s...
Cheers,
Tony
Photos, paintings and drawings of Australian, NZ, Swiss and British Birds
www.tonykeenebirds.co.uk
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