The broad– billed pantomimist or raven pantomimist( Lophopsittacus mauritianus) is a large defunct pantomimist in the family Psittaculidae. It was aboriginal to the Mascarene islet of Mauritius. The species was first appertained to as the” Indian raven” in Dutch vessels‘ journals from 1598 onwards. Only a many brief contemporary descriptions and three delineations are known. It was first scientifically described from a subfossil beak in 1866, but this wasn’t linked to the old accounts until the detection of a detailed 1601 sketch that matched both the subfossils and the accounts. It’s unclear what other species it was most nearly related to, but it has been classified as a member of the lineage Psittaculini, along with other Mascarene parrots. It had parallels with the Rodrigues pantomimist( Necropsittacus rodricanus), and may have been nearly related.
The broad– billed pantomimist‘s head was large in proportion to its body, and there was a distinct crest of feathers on the front of the head. The raspberry had a veritably large beak, similar in size to that of the hyacinth macaw, which would have enabled it to crack hard seeds. Its bones indicate that the species displayed lesser sexual dimorphism in overall size and head size than any living pantomimist. The exact colouration is unknown, but a contemporary description indicates that it had multiple colours, including a blue head, and maybe a red body and beak. It’s believed to have been a weak flier, but not flightless. The raspberry came defunct in the 17th century owing to a combination of deforestation, predation by introduced invasive species, and presumably hunting as well.
The foremost known descriptions of the broad– billed pantomimist were handed by Dutch trippers during the Alternate Dutch passage to Indonesia, led by the Dutch Crewmate Jacob Cornelis van Neck in 1598. They appear in reports published in 1601, which also contain the first illustration of the raspberry, along with the first of a fogy . The description for the illustration reads” 5 * Is a raspberry which we called the Indian Crow, further than doubly as big as the parroquets, of two or three colours”. The Dutch mariners who visited Mauritius categorised the broad– billed parrots independently from parrots, and appertained to them as” Indische ravens”( restated as either” Indian ravens” or” Indian crows”) without accompanying useful descriptions, which caused confusion when their journals were studied. The Dutch painter Jacob Savery lived in a house in Amsterdam called” In de Indische Acclamation“( Dutch for” in the Indian raven”) until 1602, since Dutch houses had billboards rather of figures at the time. While he and his family, the painter Roelant Savery, didn’t paint this species and it doesn’t appear to have been transported from Mauritius, they may have read about it or heard about it from the latter’s connections in the court of Emperor Rudolf II( Roelant painted other defunct Mauritian species in the emperor’s menagerie).
The British naturalist Hugh Edwin Strickland assigned the” Indian ravens” to the hornbill genus Buceros in 1848, because he interpreted the protuberance on the forepart in the 1601 illustration as a cornucopia. The Dutch and the French also appertained to South American macaws as” Indian ravens” during the 17th century, and the name was used for hornbills by Dutch, French, and English speakers in the East Indies. The British rubberneck Sir Thomas Herbert appertained to the broad– billed pantomimist as” Cacatoes”( cockatoo) in 1634, with the description” catcalls like Parrats( sic), fierce and insuperable“, but naturalists didn’t realise that he was pertaining to the same raspberry. Indeed after subfossils of a pantomimist matching the descriptions were set up, the French zoologist Emile Oustalet argued in 1897 that the” Indian raven” was a hornbill whose remains awaited discovery. The Mauritian ornithologist France Staub was in favour of this idea as late as 1993. No remains of hornbills have ever been set up on the islet, and piecemeal from an defunct species from New Caledonia, hornbills aren’t set up on any oceanic islets.
The first known physical remain of the broad– billed pantomimist was a subfossil beak collected along with the first batch of fogy bones set up in the Mare aux Songes swamp. The British biologist Richard Owen described the beak in 1866 and linked it as belonging to a large pantomimist species, to which he gave the binomial name Psittacus mauritianus. This holotype instance is now lost. The common name” broad- billed pantomimist” was first used by Owen in a 1866 lecture. In 1868, shortly after the 1601 journal of the Dutch East India Company boat Gelderland had been rediscovered, the German ornithologist Hermann Schlegel examined an unlabelled pen- and- essay sketch in it. Realising that the delineation, which is attributed to the Dutch artist Joris Joostensz Laerle, depicted the pantomimist described by Owen, Schlegel made the connection with the old journal descriptions. Because its bones and crest are significantly different from those of Psittacus species, the British zoologist Alfred Newton assigned it to its own rubric in 1875, which he called Lophopsittacus. Lophos is the Ancient Greek word for crest, pertaining then to the raspberry‘s anterior crest, and psittakos means pantomimist. further fuds were latterly set up by Theodore Sauzier, and described by the British ornithologists Edward Newton and Hans Gadow in 1893. These included preliminarily unknown rudiments similar as the sternum( bone– bone), femur, metatarsus, and a lower jaw larger than the bone that was firstly described.
In 1967, the American ornithologist James Greenway suspected that reports of slate Mauritian parrots appertained to the broad– billed pantomimist. In 1973, grounded on remains collected by the French amateur naturalist Louis Etienne Thirioux in the early 20th century, the British ornithologist DanielT. Holyoak placed a small subfossil Mauritian pantomimist in the same rubric as the broad– billed pantomimist and named it Lophopsittacus bensoni. In 2007, on the base of a comparison of subfossils, and identified with old descriptions of small slate parrots, the British palaeontologist Julian Hume reclassified it as a species in the rubric Psittacula and called it Thirioux’s slate pantomimist. Hume also reidentified a cranium set up by Thirioux that was firstly assigned to the Rodrigues pantomimist( Necropsittacus rodricanus) as belonging to the broad– billed pantomimist rather, making it only the alternate cranium known of this species.
elaboration
The taxonomic affections of the broad– billed pantomimist are undetermined. Considering its large jaws and other osteological features, Newton and Gadow allowed it to be nearly related to the Rodrigues pantomimist in 1893, but were unfit to determine whether they both belonged in the same rubric, since a crest was only known from the ultimate. The British ornithologist GrahamS. Cowles rather set up their craniums too different for them to be close cousins in 1987.
numerous aboriginal Mascarene catcalls, including the fogy , are deduced from South Asian ancestors, and the British ecologist AnthonyS. Cheke and Hume have proposed that this may be the case for all the parrots there as well. Sea situations were lower during the Pleistocene, so it was possible for species to colonise some of the also less isolated islets. Although utmost defunct pantomimist species of the Mascarenes are inadequately known, subfossil remains show that they participated features similar as enlarged heads and jaws, reduced pectoral bones, and robust leg bones. Hume has suggested that they’ve a common origin in the radiation of the lineage Psittaculini, grounding this proposition on morphological features and the fact that parrots from that group have managed to colonise numerous isolated islets in the Indian Ocean. The Psittaculini may have raided the area several times, as numerous of the species were so specialised that they may have evolved significantly on hotspot islets before the Mascarenes surfaced from the ocean.
The broad– billed pantomimist had a disproportionately large head and jaws, and the cranium was smoothed from top to bottom, unlike in other Mascarene parrots. Crests on the cranium indicate that its distinct anterior crest of feathers was forcefully attached, and that the raspberry, unlike cockatoos, couldn’t raise or lower it. The range of the hind edge of the mandibular symphysis( where the two halves of the lower jaw connected) indicate that the jaws were comparatively broad. The 1601 Gelderland sketch was examined in 2003 by Hume, who compared the essay finish with the underpinning pencil sketch and set up that the ultimate showed several fresh details. The pencil sketch depicts the crest as a stack of rounded feathers attached to the front of the head at the base of the beak, and shows rounded bodies with long primary covert feathers, large secondary feathers, and a slightly bifurcated tail, with the two central feathers longer than the rest measures of some of the first given bones show that the beak was 65 – 78 millimetres(2.6 –3.1 in) in length, 65 mm(2.6 in) in range, the femur was 58 – 63 mm(2.3 –2.5 in) in length, the tibia was 88 – 99 mm(3.5 –3.9 in), and the metatarsus 35 mm(1.4 in).( 11) The sternum was fairly reduced.
Subfossils show that the males were larger, measuring 55 – 65 centimetres( 22 – 26 in) to the ladies‘ 45 – 55 cm( 18 – 22 in). The sexual dimorphism in size between manly and womanish craniums is the largest among parrots. Differences in the bones of the rest of the body and branches are less pronounced; nonetheless, it had lesser sexual dimorphism in overall size than any living pantomimist. The size differences between the two catcalls in the 1601 sketch may be due to this point. A 1602 account by the Dutch seaman Reyer Cornelisz has traditionally been interpreted as the only contemporary citation of size differences among broad– billed parrots, listing” large and small Indian crows” among the creatures of the islet. A full paraphrase of the original textbook was only published in 2003, and showed that a comma had been inaptly placed in the English restatement;” large and small” rather appertained to” field– hens”, conceivably the red rail and the lower Cheke’s wood rail.