''Polyerata'' is a genus of

hummingbird Hummingbirds are birds native to the Americas and comprise the biological family Trochilidae. With about 361 species and 113 genera, they occur from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, but the vast majority of the species are found in the tropics aro ...

Species

The genus contains three species: *

Blue-chested hummingbird The blue-chested hummingbird (''Polyerata amabilis'') is a species of hummingbird in the family Trochilidae. It is found in Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Panama. Its natural habitats are subtropical or tropical moist lowland f ...

, ''Polyerata amabilis'' * Charming hummingbird, ''Polyerata decora'' * Purple-chested hummingbird, ''Polyerata rosenbergi'' These species were formerly placed in the genus ''

Amazilia ''Amazilia'' is a hummingbird genus in the subfamily Trochilinae. It is found in tropical Central and South America. Taxonomy The genus ''Amazilia'' was introduced in 1843 by the French naturalist René Lesson. Lesson had used ''amazilia'' i ...

''. 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 2014 found that ''Amazilia'' was

polyphyletic A polyphyletic group is an assemblage of organisms or other evolving elements that is of mixed evolutionary origin. The term is often applied to groups that share similar features known as homoplasies, which are explained as a result of converg ...

. In the revised classification 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, these three species were moved to the resurrected genus ''Polyerata'' that had been introduced in 1863 by the German ornithologist

Ferdinand Heine Jakob Gottlieb Ferdinand Heine (9 March 1809, in Halberstadt – 28 March 1894) was a German ornithologist and collector. Heine had one of the largest private collection of birds in the mid-19th century. The collection now housed at the Heineanum ...

to accommodate the

blue-chested hummingbird The blue-chested hummingbird (''Polyerata amabilis'') is a species of hummingbird in the family Trochilidae. It is found in Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Panama. Its natural habitats are subtropical or tropical moist lowland f ...

which therefore becomes 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 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 peri ...

''poluēratos'' meaning "very lovely".

References

{{Taxonbar, from=Q1238736 Polyerata Bird genera