Ifritidae, Schoddei & Christidis, 2014

Schoddei, Richard & Christidis, Les, 2014, Relicts from Tertiary Australasia: undescribed families and subfamilies of songbirds (Passeriformes) and their zoogeographic signal, Zootaxa 3786 (5), pp. 501-522 : 511

Family Ifritidae , familia nova ―ifrits

Type genus: Ifrita Rothschild, 1898

Diagnosis. Small-medium, stocky, tawny-brown songbirds with powerful feet and a black cap wreathed in iridescent mid blue; sexes dimorphic: ear streak white in males, tawny in females; juveniles as adults but duller; head rather broad, the bill thrush-like, tomia smooth except for terminal maxillary notch, and narial depression elliptic, with inoperculate, holorhinal and internally pervious nostrils opening externally in small circular apertures distal in narial depression, rictal bristles short and sparse; skull with fully perforate interorbital septum except for narrow medial bar, short, blunt-winged ectethmoids that do not reach the jugal bar, apparently fused lachrymals, a palate with broad, bifid-tipped vomer and broad, square-tipped maxillo-palatine processes, and narrow, deep, welldefined temporal fossae flanked by short, thick, ventrally projecting postorbital processes and longer, finer, anteriorly projecting zygomatic processes; sternum broad with shallow keel c. ⅓–½ x sternum width, lateral trabeculae short, c. ¼–⅓ x length of sternum, hardly flared at tips, sternal rostrum reduced; wings rounded, primaries 10, with p10 well-developed, p7 longest and p8=p4; humeral fossae single, very deep and trabeculated, the incisura capitis moderately deep and developed into a shallow tricipital depression, ventral tubercle squared and protuberant, and pectoral crest lengthened and decurrent below fossa; tail rather short and square-tipped, tail/ wing ratio 0.62–0.70(–0.73), the rectrices 12, straight-sided without terminal flaring, shallowly acute at tips; feet stout with enlarged toes and claws, tarsi booted. Nest a bulky cup of fern tendrils and rootlets, lined with finer pieces of the same materials and occasional feathers and skeletonized leaves, camouflaged on the outside with thickly interwoven moss and leafy liverworts, and inserted in the upright fork of a small tree c. 1–3 m above the ground; eggs 1, rarely 2 per clutch, broadly ovoid, satin milk-white, sparsely sprinkled with discrete, round spots of purplish-black, concentrated towards the larger end and sometimes forming a sparse cap. Arboreal, scansorial, forest-living insectivores, gleaning by creeping and probing, nuthatch-like, up and down branches and limbs; breeding system unknown.

Range and composition. Montane rainforests of New Guinea; one genus: Ifrita Rothschild, 1898 , of one species: I. kowaldi (De Vis, 1890) .