A parakeet specimen held at National Museums Scotland is a unique skin of the extinct Reunion Parakeet Psittacula eques eques: a reply to Cheke and Jansen ()

Abstract

Cheke and Jansen (2016) questioned the identity of a parakeet specimen at National Museums Scotland (NMS), Edinburgh, which is considered in a paper by Jackson et al. (2015) to be a specimen of the extinct R eunion Parakeet Psittacula eques eques (Boddaert, 1783). They suggest that with the available information, its provenance cannot be ascribed with any certainty and it is most likely, on the basis of probability, to be from Mauritius, although they do not exclude the possibility that the parakeet comes from R eunion, the neighbouring island of Mauritius. The provenance and identity of this specimen has previously been questioned (Jones 1987, Hume 2007, Hume & Walters 2012), with the possibility that it may be a Mauritius Parakeet Psittacula eques echo. Since these accounts were written, more work conducted on Psittacula parakeets of the Indian Ocean Islands indicates that the Edinburgh specimen is a R eunion Parakeet, and Cheke and Jansen (2016) would have been unaware of some of this work.