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Wallace's Fairywren
Wallace's fairywren (''Sipodotus wallacii'') is a species of bird in the Australasian wren family, Maluridae. It is monotypic within the genus ''Sipodotus''. It is found in New Guinea and the Aru Islands, where its natural habitat is subtropical or tropical moist lowland forest, forests. Taxonomy and systematics The Wallace's fairywren is the only member of the monotypic genus ''Sipodotus''. Wallace's fairywren was originally described in the genus ''Todopsis'' as ''Todopsis wallacii'' by George Robert Gray, G. R. Gray in 1862 on the basis of specimens collected by Charles Allen on Misool, Misool Island. Specimens from the Aru Islands were described as ''Todopsis coronata'' by John Gould in 1878. Gregory Mathews, Mathews established the monotypic genus ''Sipodotus'' for the Wallace's fairywren in 1928 on the basis of the shape of the bill and the nearly identical plumages of the male and female of the species. The species has also been placed in the genus Malurus. When the specie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gregory Macalister Mathews
Gregory Macalister Mathews CBE FRSE FZS FLS (10 September 1876 – 27 March 1949) was an Australian-born amateur ornithologist who spent most of his later life in England. Life He was born in Biamble in New South Wales the son of Robert H. Mathews. He was educated at The King's School, Parramatta. Mathews made his fortune in mining shares, and moved to England in 1902. In 1910 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were William Eagle Clarke, Ramsay Heatley Traquair, John Alexander Harvie-Brown and William Evans. Ornithology Mathews was a controversial figure in Australian ornithology. He was responsible for bringing trinomial nomenclature into local taxonomy, however he was regarded as an extreme splitter. He recognised large numbers of subspecies on scant evidence and few notes. The extinct Lord Howe Pigeon was described by Mathews in 1915, using a painting as a guide. At the time, he named it ''Raperia godmanae'' for Alice Mary Godman. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alfred Russel Wallace
Alfred Russel Wallace (8 January 1823 – 7 November 1913) was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, biologist and illustrator. He is best known for independently conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection. His 1858 paper on the subject was published that year alongside extracts from Charles Darwin's earlier writings on the topic. It spurred Darwin to set aside the "big species book" he was drafting, and quickly write an abstract of it, published in 1859 as ''On the Origin of Species''. Wallace did extensive fieldwork, first in the Amazon River basin. He then did fieldwork in the Malay Archipelago, where he identified the faunal divide now termed the Wallace Line, which separates the Indonesian archipelago into two distinct parts: a western portion in which the animals are largely of Asian origin, and an eastern portion where the fauna reflect Australasia. He was considered the 19th century's leading expert on the geographical di ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Milne Bay
Milne Bay is a large bay in Milne Bay Province, south-eastern Papua New Guinea. More than long and over wide, Milne Bay is a sheltered deep-water harbor accessible via Ward Hunt Strait. It is surrounded by the heavily wooded Stirling Range to the north and south, and on the northern shore, a narrow coastal strip, soggy with sago and mangrove swamps. The bay is named after Sir Alexander Milne. History * Surveyed by Luis Vaez de Torres in July 1606. * Surveyed by Captain Owen Stanley, R.N. F.R.S. in 1850. World War II During World War II, the area was the site of the Battle of Milne Bay in 1942 and by late 1943 it became the major support base, Naval Base Milne Bay, for the New Guinea campaign through the development of Finschhafen as an advanced base after that area was secured in the Huon Peninsula campaign. By January 1944 about 140 vessels were in harbor due to congestion at the facilities. Congestion was relieved by opening of a port at Finschhafen and extensive improveme ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bird's Head Peninsula
The Bird's Head Peninsula ( Indonesian: ''Kepala Burung'', nl, Vogelkop) or Doberai Peninsula (''Semenanjung Doberai''), is a large peninsula that makes up the northwest portion of the island of New Guinea, comprising the Indonesian provinces of Southwest Papua and West Papua. The peninsula just to the south is called the Bomberai Peninsula, while the peninsula at the opposite end of the island (in Papua New Guinea) is called the Bird's Tail Peninsula. Location and geography The Bird's Head Peninsula is at the northwestern end of the island of New Guinea. It is bounded by Cenderawasih Bay to the east, Bintuni Bay to the south, and the Dampier Strait to the west. Across the strait is Waigeo, an island in the Raja Ampat archipelago. Batanta island lies just off the peninsula’s northwest tip. Another peninsula, Bomberai Peninsula, lies to the south, across Bintuni Bay. The peninsula is around 200 by 300 kilometers, and is bio-geographically diverse, containing coastal plain ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yapen
Yapen (also Japan, Jobi) is an island of Papua, Indonesia. The Yapen Strait separates Yapen and the Biak Islands to the north. It is in Cenderawasih Bay off the north-western coast of the island of New Guinea. To the west is Mios Num Island across the Mios Num Strait, and to the east Kurudu Island. Off the southeast coast of Yapen are the Amboi Islands and to the southwest are the Kuran Islands. Together these islands form the Yapen Islands Regency within the province of Papua. It is populated with communities of Yobi, Randowaya, Serui, and Ansus. Its highest point is . First recorded sighting by Europeans is by Spanish navigator Álvaro de Saavedra who landed on 24 June 1528 when trying to return from Tidore to New Spain. It was then charted as ''Paine'' within the ''Islas de Oro'' (Golden Islands in Spanish), as they called Yapen and the present day Schoutens. In 1545 it was visited by Íñigo Órtiz de Retes on board of galleon ''San Juan''. The earthquake of 1979 c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Meliphagidae
The honeyeaters are a large and diverse family, Meliphagidae, of small to medium-sized birds. The family includes the Australian chats, myzomelas, friarbirds, wattlebirds, miners and melidectes. They are most common in Australia and New Guinea, and found also in New Zealand, the Pacific islands as far east as Samoa and Tonga, and the islands to the north and west of New Guinea known as Wallacea. Bali, on the other side of the Wallace Line, has a single species. In total there are 186 species in 55 genera, roughly half of them native to Australia, many of the remainder occupying New Guinea. With their closest relatives, the Maluridae (Australian fairy-wrens), Pardalotidae (pardalotes), and Acanthizidae (thornbills, Australian warblers, scrubwrens, etc.), they comprise the superfamily Meliphagoidea and originated early in the evolutionary history of the oscine passerine radiation. Although honeyeaters look and behave very much like other nectar-feeding passerines around the wor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Meliphagoidea
__NOTOC__ Meliphagoidea is a superfamily of passerine birds. They contain a vast diversity of small to mid-sized songbirds widespread in the Austropacific region. The Australian Continent has the largest richness in genera and species. Systematics This group was proposed based on the phenetic DNA-DNA hybridization studies of Charles Sibley ''et al.''. A more modern definition of a monophyletic Meliphagoidea based on cladistic analysis was made by ornithologists at the American Museum of Natural History.Barker, F. Keith; Cibois, Alice; Schikler, Peter A.; Feinstein, Julie & Cracraft, Joel (2004): Phylogeny and diversification of the largest avian radiation. ''PNAS'' 101 (30): 11040–11045. PDF fulltext Families *Family Maluridae: fairy-wrens, emu-wrens and grasswrens *Family Dasyornithidae: bristlebirds. Formerly in Acanthizidae. *Family Acanthizidae: scrubwrens, thornbills and gerygones *Family Pardalotidae: pardalotes (but see below) *Family Meliphagidae: honeyeaters The ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sylviidae
Sylviidae is a family of passerine birds that includes the typical warblers and a number of babblers formerly placed within the Old World babbler family. They are found in Eurasia and Africa. Taxonomy and systematics The scientific name Sylviidae was introduced by the English zoologist William Elford Leach (as Sylviadæ) in a guide to the contents of the British Museum published in 1820. The family became part of an assemblage known as the Old World warblers and was a wastebin taxon with over 400 species of bird in over 70 genera. Advances in classification, particularly helped with molecular data, have led to the splitting out of several new families from within this group. There is now evidence that these ''Sylvia'' "warblers" are more closely related to the Old World babblers than the warblers and thus these birds are better referred to as Sylvia babblers, or just sylviids. A molecular phylogenetic study using mitochondrial DNA sequence data published in 2011 found that the s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Muscicapidae
The Old World flycatchers are a large family, the Muscicapidae, of small passerine birds restricted to the Old World (Europe, Africa and Asia), with the exception of several vagrants and two species, Bluethroat (''Luscinia svecica)'' and Northern Wheatear (''Oenanthe oenanthe''), found also in North America. These are mainly small arboreal insectivores, many of which, as the name implies, take their prey on the wing. The family includes 344 species and is divided into 51 genera. Taxonomy The name Muscicapa for the family was introduced by the Scottish naturalist John Fleming in 1822. The word had earlier been used for the genus ''Muscicapa'' by the French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson in 1760. Muscicapa comes from the Latin ''musca'' meaning a fly and '' capere'' to catch. In 1910 the German ornithologist Ernst Hartert found it impossible to define boundaries between the three families Muscicapidae, Sylviidae (Old World warblers) and Turdidae (thrushes). He therefore treat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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