''Machaeropterus'' is a

genus Genus ( plural genera ) is a taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms as well as viruses. In the hierarchy of biological classification, genus comes above species and below family. In binomial nom ...

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 th ...

birds in the manakin family

Pipridae The manakins are a family, Pipridae, of small suboscine passerine birds. The group contains some 54 species distributed through the American tropics. The name is from Middle Dutch ''mannekijn'' "little man" (also the source of the different bird ...

. They are found in the tropical forests of South America.

Taxonomy

The genus ''Machaeropterus'' was introduced by the French naturalist Charles Lucien Bonaparte in 1854. 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 specime ...

was subsequently designated as the kinglet manakin. The name ''Machaeropterus'' combines the

Ancient Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic p ...

words μαχαιρα ''makhaira'' "knife" or "dagger" and -πτερος ''-pteros'' "-winged". The genus contains the five species:

References

Pipridae Bird genera Taxa named by Charles Lucien Bonaparte Taxonomy articles created by Polbot {{Pipridae-stub