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The Tahiti crake (''Zapornia nigra''), also known as Miller's rail, was a species of 
bird
Birds are a group of warm-blooded vertebrates constituting the class Aves (), characterised by feathers, toothless beaked jaws, the laying of hard-shelled eggs, a high metabolic rate, a four-chambered heart, and a strong yet lightweig ...
in the family Rallidae
The rails, or Rallidae, are a large cosmopolitan family of small- to medium-sized, ground-living birds. The family exhibits considerable diversity and includes the crakes, coots, and gallinules. Many species are associated with wetlands, althou ...
.
It was endemic
Endemism is the state of a species being found in a single defined geographic location, such as an island, state, nation, country or other defined zone; organisms that are indigenous to a place are not endemic to it if they are also found else ...
to Tahiti
Tahiti (; Tahitian ; ; previously also known as Otaheite) is the largest island of the Windward group of the Society Islands in French Polynesia. It is located in the central part of the Pacific Ocean and the nearest major landmass is Austra ...
. It was discovered and painted by Georg Forster
Johann George Adam Forster, also known as Georg Forster (, 27 November 1754 – 10 January 1794), was a German naturalist, ethnologist, travel writer, journalist and revolutionary. At an early age, he accompanied his father, Johann Reinhold ...
during the second Cook voyage. John Frederick Miller
John Frederick Miller (1759–1796) was an English illustrator, mainly of botanical subjects.
Miller was the son of the artist Johann Sebastian Müller (1715 – c. 1790). Miller, along with his brother James, produced paintings from the sketches ...
copied Forster's painting and published it with some changes and remarks in his work ''Cimelia Physica'' in 1784. It probably went extinct in about 1800 from introduced predators.
References
Zapornia Controversial bird taxa Extinct birds of Oceania Birds described in 1784 Taxa named by John Frederick Miller Taxonomy articles created by Polbot † {{Gruiformes-stub