The conundrum of an overlooked skeleton referable to Imperial Woodpecker Campephilus imperialis in the collection of the Natural History Museum at Tring
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Issue date
2021-03-09Submitted date
2021-03-01
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Show full item recordAbstract
The discovery of an overlooked skeleton of Imperial Woodpecker Campephilus imperialis in the bird collection of the Natural History Museum at Tring (NHMUK) is documented, one of very few known to exist worldwide of this almost certainly extinct species. We present evidence that, on balance of probabilities, it is one of two collected by Alphonse Forrer in 1882 near the settlement of La Ciudad in the Sierra Madre Occidental, Durango, western Mexico; the whereabouts of the other, which did not come to NHMUK, appears currently unknown. During research into the NHMUK specimen, we demonstrated that the supposed Imperial Woodpecker skull held in the collection of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, must in fact be that of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker C. principalis.Citation
Robert P. Prŷs-Jones, Albrecht Manegold, Judith White "The conundrum of an overlooked skeleton referable to Imperial Woodpecker Campephilus imperialis in the collection of the Natural History Museum at Tring," Bulletin of the British Ornithologists’ Club, 141(1), 66-74, (9 March 2021)Publisher
British Ornithologists' ClubType
Journal ArticleItem Description
© 2021 The Authors; This is an open‐access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The attached file is the published version of the article.NHM Repository
ISSN
0007-1595ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.25226/bboc.v141i1.2021.a7
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