Balearic shearwater
| Balearic shearwater | |
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| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Aves |
| Order: | Procellariiformes |
| Family: | Procellariidae |
| Genus: | Puffinus |
| Species: | P. mauretanicus |
| Binomial name | |
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Puffinus mauretanicus P.R. Lowe, 1921 |
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| Synonyms | |
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Puffinus puffinus mauretanicus |
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Puffinus puffinus mauretanicus
Puffinus yelkouan mauretanicus
The Balearic shearwater (Puffinus mauretanicus) is a medium-sized shearwater in the seabird family Procellariidae. Puffinus is a New Latin loanword based on the English "puffin" and its variants, such as poffin, pophyn and puffing, that referred to the cured carcass of the fat nestling of the Manx shearwater, a former delicacy. The specific mauretanicus refers to Mauretania, an old name for an area of North Africa roughly corresponding to Morocco and Algeria.
It was long regarded a subspecies of the Manx shearwater (see there for more on the Puffinus puffinus superspecies); following an initial split it was held to be a subspecies of the "Mediterranean shearwater" (Sibley & Monroe 1990) for nearly ten more years, until it was resolved to be a distinct species, separate from the yelkouan shearwater (Wink et al.' 1993, Heidrich et al. 1998, Sangster et al. 2002). It is the last taxon of the puffinus complex that was recognized as a separate entity.
It appears to belong to a group of Mediterranean and adjacent Atlantic species which includes the yelkouan shearwater (Austin 1996) and one to three prehistorically extinct taxa, Hole's and possibly also Olson's shearwater and an undescribed form of unclear distinctness from Menorca (Alcover 2001). Hole's shearwater may be the closest known relative of P. mauretanicus. The two living Mediterranean lineages had probably separated before the end of the Pliocene (c. 2 mya), as indicated by molecular differences and the Ibizan fossil Puffinus nestori from the Late Pliocene or Early , which may have been the direct ancestor of the present species (Heidrich et al. 1998).
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