Nymphicus, Wagler, 1832

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 : 19

Nymphicus

Nymphicus is predominantly a small midsized gray parrot with yellow and red facial markings, white wing patches conspicuous in flight and a forward-curving crest. It is one of the world’s most popular aviary birds.

Although monotypic Nymphicus has unquestionably been recognized for decades as within the Cacatuoidea and essentially a diminutive cockatoo (see Adams et al., 1984, and Schodde and Mason, 1997, for brief reviews of morphological, karyological, behavioral, and allozyme data), its precise relationships have remained unclear. Adams et al. (1984) in an allozyme study found its position ambiguous depending on the analysis, either aligning it with the Calyptorhynchus black cockatoos or the Cacatua sensu lato white cockatoos. Brown and Toft’s (1999) results based on mitochondrially encoded 12S sequence data and reanalysis of allozyme data were similarly ambiguous. A consensus of their results was that it aligned with Calyptorhynchus as one of the “more basal cockatoo species.” A multilocus analysis led White et al. (2011) to place it as the sister group to the rest of the Cacatuoidea.

Our phylogenomic data strongly place Nymphicus as the sister to all non-calyptorhynchine cockatoos, and not as the sister to all cockatoos or indeed to the calyptorhynchines, diverging 24.8 Mya (16.2–30.4; fig. 2). We argue that all lines of data fully support retention of Nymphicus in a monogeneric subfamily, Nymphicinae, which was sister to the Cacatuinae . Similarly, it is usually treated as a monotypic species given its almost continentwide range and high vagility.