The Esmeraldas antbird (''Sipia nigricauda'') is a species of bird in the family Thamnophilidae. It is found in

Colombia Colombia (, ; ), officially the Republic of Colombia, is a country in South America with insular regions in North America—near Nicaragua's Caribbean coast—as well as in the Pacific Ocean. The Colombian mainland is bordered by the Car ...

and Ecuador. Its natural habitats are subtropical or tropical moist lowland forests and subtropical or tropical moist montane forests. The Esmeraldas antbird was described by the naturalists Osbert Salvin and Frederick DuCane Godman in 1892 and given the

binomial name In taxonomy, binomial nomenclature ("two-term naming system"), also called nomenclature ("two-name naming system") or binary nomenclature, is a formal system of naming species of living things by giving each a name composed of two parts, bot ...

''Myrmeciza nigricauda''. The original description was for a female bird and this was later the source of taxonomic confusion. The male bird was considered a different species until in 1991 it was realized that the two taxa were simply the male and female forms of the same species. A

molecular phylogenetic Molecular phylogenetics () is the branch of phylogeny that analyzes genetic, hereditary molecular differences, predominantly in DNA sequences, to gain information on an organism's evolutionary relationships. From these analyses, it is possible to ...

study published in 2013 found that the genus ''

Myrmeciza The white-bellied antbird (''Myrmeciza longipes''), is a passerine bird which breeds in the tropical New World from Panama to northern Brazil and in Trinidad Trinidad is the larger and more populous of the two major islands of Trinidad an ...

'', as then defined, was polyphyletic. In the resulting rearrangement to create

monophyletic In cladistics for a group of organisms, monophyly is the condition of being a clade—that is, a group of taxa composed only of a common ancestor (or more precisely an ancestral population) and all of its lineal descendants. Monophyletic gro ...

genera the Esmeraldas antbird was moved to a resurrected genus '' Sipia'' that had been introduced by the Austrian ornithologist Carl Eduard Hellmayr in 1924.

References

Esmeraldas antbird Birds of the Tumbes-Chocó-Magdalena Taxonomy articles created by Polbot Esmeraldas antbird Esmeraldas antbird Esmeraldas antbird {{Thamnophilidae-stub