''Melaniparus'' 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 ...

of birds in the tit family. The species were formerly placed in the speciose genus ''

Parus ''Parus'' is a genus of Old World birds in the tit family. It was formerly a large genus containing most of the 50 odd species in the family Paridae. The genus was split into several resurrected genera following the publication of a detailed mo ...

'' but were moved to ''Melaniparus'' based on a molecular phylogenetic analysis published in 2013 that showed that the members formed a distinct clade. The genus ''Melaniparus'' had originally been introduced by the French naturalist Charles Lucien Bonaparte in 1850. 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 southern black tit (''Melaniparus niger''). The name of the genus 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 ...

''melas'', ''melanos'' "black" and the genus ''

'' introduced by

Carl Linnaeus Carl Linnaeus (; 23 May 1707 – 10 January 1778), also known after his Nobility#Ennoblement, ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné#Blunt, Blunt (2004), p. 171. (), was a Swedish botanist, zoologist, taxonomist, and physician who formalise ...

in 1758. The following species, all from Africa and mostly having dark plumage, have been placed in the genus:

References

Bird genera Paridae Taxa named by Charles Lucien Bonaparte {{Paridae-stub