''Heliothryx'' is a genus of hummingbird in the family

Trochilidae 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 ...

. The genus is assigned to the subfamily

Polytminae Polytminae is one of the six subfamilies of the hummingbird family Trochilidae. The subfamily contains 12 genera with a total of 29 species. The informal name "mangoes" has been proposed for this group as the seven species in the largest genus, ...

which is sometimes referred to by the informal name "mangoes".

Taxonomy

The genus ''Heliothryx'' was introduced in 1831 by the German zoologist

Friedrich Boie Friedrich Boie (4 June 1789 – 3 March 1870) was a German entomologist, herpetologist, ornithologist, and lawyer.Beolens, Bo; Watkins, Michael; Grayson, Michael (2011). ''The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles''. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Universit ...

. Boie did not specify 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 ...

but this was designated as the black-eared fairy by

George Robert Gray George Robert Gray FRS (8 July 1808 – 6 May 1872) was an English zoologist and author, and head of the ornithological section of the British Museum, now the Natural History Museum, in London for forty-one years. He was the younger brother ...

in 1840. The genus name combines the

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 ...

''hēlios'' meaning "sun" with ''thrix'' meaning "hair". The genus contains the following two species:

References

Taxonomy articles created by Polbot {{hummingbird-stub