GALAPAGOS HAS A NEW ENDEMIC SEABIRD SPECIES
The "new" species is the Galapagos Shearwater (Puffinus subalaris).
This bird has been known in Galapagos for more than 100 years, but was considered an endemic subspecies of Audubon's Shearwater and had the scientific name Puffinus lherminieri subalaris.
The American Ornithologists' Union's South American Classification Committee (SACC; http://www.museum.lsu.edu/~Remsen/SACCBaseline.html) has recently accepted a change in taxonomy of shearwaters that includes a change in the name of the shearwater that lives in Galapagos. The SACC reviewed the taxonomy of the shearwaters published in Austin et al. (2004), which shows that although the subspecies subalaris of the Galapagos Islands has been traditionally treated as a subspecies of P. lherminieri, genetic data strongly indicate that subalaris is a full species that is closely related to Puffinus nativitatis and is only distantly related to P. lherminieri. The seabird biologist Robert Cushman Murphy had recognised as long ago as 1927 that subalaris is morphologically distinct from other shearwaters.
Austin, J. J., V. Bretagnolle, and E. Pasquet. 2004. A global molecular phylogeny of the small Puffinus shearwaters and implications for systematics of the Little-Audubon's Shearwater complex. Auk 121: 847-864.
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