Pyrilia, Bonaparte, 1856

Smith, Brian Tilston, Thom, Gregory & Joseph, Leo, 2024, Revised Evolutionary And Taxonomic Synthesis For Parrots (Order: Psittaciformes) Guided By Phylogenomic Analysis, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2024 (468), pp. 1-87 : 33

Pyrilia

Pyrilia are midsized, stocky parrots of humid forest lowlands in Central America through the Amazon Basin. They are predominantly green, but each has a distinctively colored pattern of plumage or skin about the head. Two species remarkable for largely bare heads were formerly placed in Gypopsitta Bonaparte, 1856 . Banks et al. (2008) demonstrated why Pyrilia Bonaparte, 1856 , has priority over Gypopsitta Bonaparte, 1856 , for this assemblage.

The phylogenomic concatenated and species trees differ in the placement of P. caica amongst the trees and with previous studies based on mitochondrial DNA and plumage characters ( Ribas et al., 2005, Eberhard and Bermingham, 2005). In the phylogeny by Ribas et al. ( Ribas et al., 2005), which includes subspecific sampling, P. caica was sister to P. vulturina / P. aurantiocephala . The phylogenomic species tree, however, had P. caica as sister to P. barrabandi , and they were in turn sister to P. vulturina / P. aurantiocephala . The phylogenomic concatenated tree had P. caica as sister to the clade containing P. barrabandi , P. vulturina , and P. aurantiocephala . These alternative topologies support different biogeographic sequences of divergence. The species tree sister relationship between P. caica and P. barrabandi supports an initial break across the Rio Negro, whereas the concatenated and prior mtDNA trees support alternative scenarios involving the initial divergence across the Amazon river and Andes. None of the trees support a clade ( P. haematotis , P. pulchra , and P. pyrilia ) distributed west of the Andes indicating there were multiple crossings over or around the Andes. The time-calibrated phylogenomic tree supported a relatively shallow temporal scale for the diversification of Pyrilia (crown age 4.5 Mya [2.6–6.5]).