The southern chestnut-tailed antbird (''Sciaphylax hemimelaena'') is a species of

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 ...

bird in the family Thamnophilidae. It is found in the

Amazon Rainforest The Amazon rainforest, Amazon jungle or ; es, Selva amazónica, , or usually ; french: Forêt amazonienne; nl, Amazoneregenwoud. In English, the names are sometimes capitalized further, as Amazon Rainforest, Amazon Forest, or Amazon Jungle. ...

in far southern

Colombia Colombia (, ; ), officially the Republic of Colombia, is a country in South America with insular regions in North America—near Nicaragua's Caribbean coast—as well as in the Pacific Ocean. The Colombian mainland is bordered by the Car ...

, eastern

Peru , image_flag = Flag of Peru.svg , image_coat = Escudo nacional del Perú.svg , other_symbol = Great Seal of the State , other_symbol_type = Seal (emblem), National seal , national_motto = "Fi ...

, northern

Bolivia , image_flag = Bandera de Bolivia (Estado).svg , flag_alt = Horizontal tricolor (red, yellow, and green from top to bottom) with the coat of arms of Bolivia in the center , flag_alt2 = 7 × 7 square p ...

, and western and central

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

. The southern chestnut-tailed antbird was originally described by the English zoologist Philip Sclater in 1857 and given the

binomial name In taxonomy, binomial nomenclature ("two-term naming system"), also called nomenclature ("two-name naming system") or binary nomenclature, is a formal system of naming species of living things by giving each a name composed of two parts, bot ...

''Myrmeciza emimelaena''. 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 2013 found that the genus ''

Myrmeciza The white-bellied antbird (''Myrmeciza longipes''), is a passerine bird which breeds in the tropical New World from Panama to northern Brazil and in Trinidad Trinidad is the larger and more populous of the two major islands of Trinidad an ...

'', as then defined, was polyphyletic. In the resulting rearrangement 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 southern chestnut-tailed antbird and the northern chestnut-tailed antbird were moved to a newly erected genus '' Sciaphylax''.

References

southern chestnut-tailed antbird Birds of the Amazon rainforest Birds of the Bolivian Amazon Birds of the Ecuadorian Amazon Birds of the Peruvian Amazon southern chestnut-tailed antbird southern chestnut-tailed antbird Taxonomy articles created by Polbot {{Thamnophilidae-stub