*** Welcome to piglix ***

Bernieriidae

Madagascan warblers
Long-billed Greenbul.jpg
The long-billed bernieria (Bernieria madagascariensis) was formerly placed in the Pycnonotidae
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Aves
Order: Passeriformes
Superfamily: Sylvioidea
Family: Bernieridae
Cibois, David, Gregory & Pasquet, 2010
Genera

see text


see text

The Madagascan warblers are a newly validated family of songbirds. They were formally named Bernieridae in 2010. The family currently consists of eleven species (in eight genera) of small forest birds. These birds are all endemic to Madagascar.

In 1934, the monophyly of this group was proposed by Finn Salomonsen but the traditional assignments of these birds were maintained, mistaken by their convergent evolution and the lack of dedicated research. The families to which the Malagasy warblers were formerly assigned—Pycnonotidae (bulbuls) and even more so Timaliidae (Old World babblers) and the Old World warbler—were used as "wastebin taxa", uniting unrelated lineages that were somewhat similar ecologically and morphologically.

It was not until the analysis of mtDNA and 16S rRNA (Cibois et al. 1999, 2001) as well as nDNA RAG-1 and RAG-2 exon (Beresford et al. 2005) sequence data, that the long-proposed grouping was accepted.

There are eight genera recognized:

Several of these species are very poorly known and were described by science only very recently. Appert's tetraka was only described in 1972 and the cryptic warbler in 1996. The Appert's tetraka, along with the dusky tetraka are threatened by habitat loss, and are listed as vulnerable.


...
Wikipedia

...