The pygmy geese are a group of very small "
perching duck
The term perching ducks is used colloquially to mean any species of ducks distinguished by their readiness to perch high in trees
Until the late 20th century, perching ducks meant ''Cairinini'', a tribe of ducks in the duck, goose and swan family ...
s" in the
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 ...
''Nettapus'' which breed in the Old World tropics. They are the smallest of all
wildfowl
The Anatidae are the biological family of water birds that includes ducks, geese, and swans. The family has a cosmopolitan distribution, occurring on all the world's continents except Antarctica. These birds are adapted for swimming, floating on ...
. As the "perching ducks" are a
paraphyletic group, they need to be placed elsewhere. The initially assumed relationship with the
dabbling duck subfamily Anatinae has been questioned, and it appears they form a lineage in an ancient
Gondwanan radiation of waterfowl, within which they are of unclear affinities. An undescribed fossil species from the late Hemphillian (5.0–4.1 mya) of
Jalisco, central
Mexico
Mexico (Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guatema ...
, has also been identified from the distal end of a tarsometatarsus. It is only record of the genus in the New World.
The genus ''Nettapus'' was erected by the German naturalist
Johann Friedrich von Brandt in 1836. The name is from
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 ...
''nētta'' meaning "duck" and ''pous'' meaning "foot". It was thought that 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 ...
, the
African pygmy goose
The African pygmy goose (''Nettapus auritus'') is a perching duck from sub-Saharan Africa. It is the smallest of Africa's waterfowl, and one of the smallest in the world.
Though pygmy geese have beaks like those of geese, they are more relat ...
(''Nettapus auritus''), possessed the feet and body of a duck and the neck of a goose.
There are three
extant species in the genus:
Pygmy geese have short bills, rounded heads and short legs. They nest in tree holes.
References
Further reading
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External links
Species text in The Atlas of Southern African Birds
{{Taxonbar, from=Q244107
Geese
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