Poicephalus, Swainson, 1837

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 : 22

Poicephalus

The Poicephalus parrots are a small radiation endemic to Africa. They are midsized stocky parrots, predominantly green with dark upperparts but with species-specific bands of color often on the abdominal (belly) plumage, underwings and rump. We note below (see Psephotellus of Australia) a possible case of convergent plumage evolution involving several species of Poicephalus .

Pioneering molecular work on Poicephalus ( Massa et al., 2000) was based on random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD). While one of its findings, a sister-group relationship between P. cryptoxanthus and P. meyeri , may have reflected plesiomorphy or homoplasy, many of their results are supported broadly here.

The radiation of Poicephalus had a crown age of 7.5 Mya and the majority of the species had divergences in the Pliocene (fig. 3). The topology within Poicephalus was less robust due to low-quality samples and nodes with low support. The issues likely stemmed from the P. flavifrons and P. rueppellii samples coming from historical samples that produced limited data, making them harder to place in the tree. Poicephalus fuscicollis also had lower-quality data and did not meet more stringent filters of quality control of Smith et al. (2023); it was, however, sister to P. robustus in the phylogenomic trees. This result was consistent with previous phylogenetic work based on mtDNA but inconsistent with a phylogeny inferred from concatenated nuclear and mtDNA, which found P. robustus to be more closely related to P. gulielmi ( Coetzer et al., 2015) . Poicephalus crassus is known from few museum specimens and has not been sequenced. Given the close similarity in plumage in P. crassus and P. cryptoxanthus , they are likely closely related. The positions of P. rufiventris and P. senegalus varied between estimated trees, but the species tree had a better phylogenetic resolution. Recent work describes an unrecognized subspecies in P. rueppellii that differs in size and plumage color across populations in Angola ( Hubers et al., 2023).