Topic summary
Motacilla
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Wagtail.
Taxonomy
The genus Motacilla was described by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in 1758 in the of his Systema Naturae. The type species is the white wagtail. Motacilla is the Latin name for the pied wagtail; although actually a diminutive of motare, "to move about", from medieval times it led to the misunderstanding of cilla as "tail".