''Xenopsitta'' is a prehistoric parrot genus known from a

fossil A fossil (from Classical Latin , ) is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age. Examples include bones, shells, exoskeletons, stone imprints of animals or microbes, objects preserved ...

tarsometatarsus The tarsometatarsus is a bone that is only found in the lower leg of birds and some non-avian dinosaurs. It is formed from the fusion of several bones found in other types of animals, and homologous to the mammalian tarsus (ankle bones) and meta ...

in early Miocene deposits at Merkur, in western

Bohemia Bohemia ( ; cs, Čechy ; ; hsb, Čěska; szl, Czechy) is the westernmost and largest historical region of the Czech Republic. Bohemia can also refer to a wider area consisting of the historical Lands of the Bohemian Crown ruled by the Bohem ...

of the

Czech Republic The Czech Republic, or simply Czechia, is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Historically known as Bohemia, it is bordered by Austria to the south, Germany to the west, Poland to the northeast, and Slovakia to the southeast. The ...

, and described by Jiri Mlikovsky in 1998. 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 ...

is ''Xenopsitta fejfari''. The generic name derives from the Greek for "foreign" or "strange", referring to the apparent scarcity of parrots in the Miocene of Europe, and a diminutive form of the

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

for "parrot". The specific

epithet An epithet (, ), also byname, is a descriptive term (word or phrase) known for accompanying or occurring in place of a name and having entered common usage. It has various shades of meaning when applied to seemingly real or fictitious people, di ...

honours Czech palaeontologist Oldrich Fejfar. It was described as a small parrot with a short and robust tarsometatarsus resembling the tarsometatarsi of large African parrots in the genera '' Psittacus'', '' Poicephalus'' and '' Coracopsis''.

References

Psittacini Bird genera Parrots Prehistoric birds of Europe Fossil taxa described in 1998 Miocene birds {{paleo-bird-stub