Pachycephala pectoralis melanoptera Mayr

Pachycephalidae, Aegithalidae, Remizidae, Paridae, Sittidae, Neosittidae, Certhiidae, Rhabdornithidae, Climacteridae, Dicaeidae, Pardalotidae, Nectariniidae, And & Lecroy, Mary, 2010, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History Part 8. Passeriformes:, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2010 (333), pp. 1-178 : 34

Pachycephala pectoralis melanoptera Mayr

Pachycephala pectoralis melanoptera Mayr, 1932a:18 (Tetipari, central Solomon Islands).

Now Pachycephala orioloides melanoptera Mayr, 1932 . See Galbraith, 1956: 198, Mayr and Diamond, 2001: 395, Dickinson, 2003: 477, and Boles, 2007: 421.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 226318 , adult male, collected on Tetepare (5 Tetipari) Island, 08.43S, 157.33E ( USBGN, 1974), Solomon Islands, on 4 August 1928, by Hannibal Hamlin on the Whitney South Sea Expedition (no. 35026).

COMMENTS: Mayr cited the AMNH number of the holotype in the original description and gave measurements of 30 specimens from Tetepare and Rendova islands . In fact, 34 specimens of melanoptera were collected by the Whitney Expedition ; the 33 paratypes are AMNH 226297–226313 from Rendova, and AMNH 226314–226317 and 226319–226330 from Tetepare. Of these, AMNH 226321 and 226329 were exchanged to ZMB in July 1936. Rendova specimens that came to AMNH with the Rothschild Collection in 1932 were not part of Mayr’s type series .

Galbraith (1956: 198), Mayr and Diamond (2001: 395), and Boles (2007: 421) considered melanoptera a subspecies of P. pectoralis , while Dickinson (2003: 477) considered it a subspecies of the Solomon Island species P. orioloides .