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Posted by John Boyd on 20:02:22 07/17/09
In Reply to: Either Count Buffon was right or global warming has fried the brains of the AOU posted by steve siegel
DNA testing has revealed that the Piranga tanagers and others are really cardinals. This seems to have first appeared in print in a paper by Jeff Groth in 1998, but it was implicit in his results, and he didn't mention its significance.
Using different and better data, Klicka, Johnson, and Lanyon realized what they had and made it one of the points of their paper in the April 2000 Auk (available via SORA).
Other analyses followed, and a 2007 paper by Klicka, Burns, and Spellman was the last straw for the AOU, so they moved Piranga, Habia, and Chlorothraupis to the cardinal-grosbeak family.
We won't stay tanagerless. Eventually (next year?), they'll move the grassquits to the tanagers, so we'll have countable tanagers again (the honeycreepers aren't countable and the spindalis seems to not be a tanager).
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