''Alaemon'' is a genus of

bird Birds are a group of warm-blooded vertebrates constituting the class Aves (), characterised by feathers, toothless beaked jaws, the laying of hard-shelled eggs, a high metabolic rate, a four-chambered heart, and a strong yet lightweig ...

s in the family

Alaudidae Larks are passerine birds of the family Alaudidae. Larks have a cosmopolitan distribution with the largest number of species occurring in Africa. Only a single species, the horned lark, occurs in North America, and only Horsfield's bush lark occ ...

, commonly called hoopoe larks.

Taxonomy and systematics

The name ''Alaemon'' comes from the

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

''alēmōn'', meaning "wanderer" (from ''alaomai'', meaning "to wander"). The genus was established by

Alexander Keyserling Alexander Friedrich Michael Lebrecht Nikolaus Arthur Graf von Keyserling (15 August 1815 – 8 May 1891) was a Baltic German geologist and paleontologist from the Keyserlingk family of Baltic German nobility. Career Alexander von Keyse ...

and

Johann Heinrich Blasius Johann Heinrich Blasius (7 October 1809 – 26 May 1870) was a German zoologist. His sons, Rudolf Heinrich Paul Blasius (1842-1907) and August Wilhelm Heinrich Blasius (1845–1912) were ornithologists. Biography In 1836, he was appointed as ...

in 1840.

Extant species

The genus contains two species:

Former species

Other species, or subspecies, formerly considered as species in the genus Alaemon include: * Damara longbill (as ''Alaemon damarensis'') * Gordonia longbill (as ''Alaemon bradshawi'') * Benguela long-billed lark (as ''Alaemon benguelensis'') * South-eastern Dupont's lark (as ''Alaemon Margaritae'')

References

Bird genera Taxa named by Alexander von Keyserling Taxa named by Johann Heinrich Blasius {{Alaudidae-stub