Platycercinae

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 : 55-57

Platycercinae

Pezoporini

The Pezoporini are restricted to Australia. The phylogenomic trees confirm the results of Joseph et al. (2011) that Neopsephotus , Neophema , and Pezoporus form a clade, the Pezoporini, and that Pezoporus is monophyletic. Estimated divergence times among these three genera are deep. Neopsephotus and Neophema share a common ancestor 16.9 Mya (11.2–20.7), and this lineage coalesces with Pezoporus 23.8 Mya (16.7–28.5; figs. 1, 11). Both the concatenated and species trees inferred from phylogenomic data are topologically concordant for higher-level and the majority of species-level relationships within the Pezoporini. Our data affirm that Melopsittacus undulatus is not closely related to Pezoporini as had been thought prior to the advent of molecular studies. Lastly, here, we argue that Pezoporini warrants being broken into two tribes, monogeneric Pezoporini and a second tribe for Neophema and Neopsephotus . We name that tribe below after closer review of our data and the biology of these birds.

Pezoporus Pezoporus contains three midsized and highly terrestrial species with varying tail lengths relative to body size. They are either nocturnal ( P. occidentalis ) or active at dawn and dusk ( P. wallicus , P. flaviventris ). They are essentially green, finely mottled black and yellow, having very few other differences in plumage (e.g., red frons absent in P. occidentalis but present in the other two; yellower belly in P. flaviventris relative to P. wallicus ). Their plumage pattern is strikingly convergent with that of Strigops .

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The estimated split of Pezoporus wallicus and P. flaviventris was 3.8 Mya (2.1–5.2; fig. 11), which is older but overlaps with the level divergence in mtDNA that was used to elevate the two to species rank ( Murphy et al., 2011). The enigmatic and recently rediscovered P. occidentalis diverged from the ground parrots early in their history at 7.5 Mya (4.4–10). Shute et al. (2023) have reexamined the cranial osteology of the arid zone, nocturnal P. occidentalis . They summarize its osteological distinctiveness in the title of their paper as adaptive and also note it as an evolutionary trade-off between the need for species to have good hearing and vision in its largely nocturnal biology. Taxonomically, they raised the specter of reinstating monotypic Geopsittacus for P. occidentalis . As their work clearly suggests adaptive differentiation relative to the other two Pezoporus species, we do not advocate breaking up Pezoporus .