''Laticilla'' is a

genus Genus ( plural genera ) is a taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of extant taxon, living and fossil organisms as well as Virus classification#ICTV classification, viruses. In the hierarchy of biological classification, genus com ...

of small

passerine A passerine () is any bird of the order Passeriformes (; from Latin 'sparrow' and '-shaped'), which includes more than half of all bird species. Sometimes known as perching birds, passerines are distinguished from other orders of birds by t ...

birds in the family

Pellorneidae The jungle babblers are a family, Pellorneidae, of mostly Old World passerine birds belonging to the superfamily Sylvioidea. They are quite diverse in size and coloration, and usually characterised by soft, fluffy plumage and a tail on average th ...

. Members of the genus are found in Pakistan, Nepal, India and Bangladesh. 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 of the

Cisticolidae The family Cisticolidae is a group of about 160 warblers, small passerine birds found mainly in warmer southern regions of the Old World. They were formerly included within the Old World warbler family Sylviidae. This family probably originated ...

published in 2013 found that the

rufous-vented grass babbler The rufous-vented grass babbler or rufous-vented prinia (''Laticilla burnesii'') is a small warbler in the family Pellorneidae that occurs in Pakistan, northwestern India and Nepal. Taxonomy The rufous-vented grass babbler was Species description ...

did not lie within the clade containing the other

prinia Prinia is a genus of small insectivorous birds belonging to the passerine bird family Cisticolidae. They were at one time classed in the Old World warbler family, Sylviidae. The prinias are sometimes referred to as wren-warblers. They are a ...

s but instead belonged to the Pellorneidae. 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 rufous-vented prinia and the closely related swamp grass babbler were placed in the reintroduced genus ''Laticilla'' in the Pellorneidae. The genus ''Laticilla'' had been erected by the English zoologist

Edward Blyth Edward Blyth (23 December 1810 – 27 December 1873) was an English zoologist who worked for most of his life in India as a curator of zoology at the museum of the Asiatic Society of India in Calcutta. Blyth was born in London in 1810. In 1841 ...

in 1845 with the rufous-vented prinia as the

type species In zoological nomenclature, a type species (''species typica'') is the species name with which the name of a genus or subgenus is considered to be permanently taxonomically associated, i.e., the species that contains the biological type specimen ...

. The genus replaced ''Eurycercus'' that Blyth had introduced in 1844 only to subsequently discover that the name was preoccupied. The name ''Laticilla'' comes from the Latin ''latus'' for "wide" or "broad" and ''cilla'' for "tail".

Species

The genus contains the following species:

References

{{Taxonbar, from=Q14927696 Pellorneidae Bird genera * Taxa named by Edward Blyth