Sylviidae

Sylviidae
Eurasian blackcap (Sylvia atricapilla)
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Aves
Order:	Passeriformes
Infraorder:	Passerida
Superfamily:	Sylvioidea
Family:	Sylviidae Leach, 1820
Genera
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Sylviidae is a family of passerine birds that was part of an assemblage known as the Old World warblers. The family was a wastebin taxon with over 400 species of bird in over 70 genera. Advances in classification, particularly helped with molecular data, have led to the splitting out of several new families from within this group. Today the smaller family Sylviidae includes the typical warblers in the genus Sylvia, the parrotbills of Asia (formerly a separate family Paradoxornithidae), a number of babblers formerly placed within the family Timaliidae (which is being split) and the wrentit, a North American bird that has been a longstanding taxonomic mystery.

There is now evidence that these Sylvia "warblers" are more closely related to babblers Timaliidae, and thus these birds are better referred to as Sylvia babblers, or just sylvids.

The scientific name Sylviidae was coined by the English zoologist William Elford Leach in 1820.

A molecular phylogenetic study using DNA sequence data published in 2011 found that the species in the genus Sylvia formed two distinct clades. Based on these results, the ornithologists Edward Dickinson and Leslie Christidis in the fourth edition of Howard and Moore Complete Checklist of the Birds of the World, chose to split the genus and moved most of the species into a resurrected genus Curruca retaining only the Eurasian blackcap and the garden warbler in Sylvia. In an additional change they moved the African hill babbler and Dohrn's thrush-babbler into Sylvia. The split was not made by the British Ornithologists' Union on the grounds that "a split into two genera would unnecessarily destabilize nomenclature and results in only a minor increase in phylogenetic information content."

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Wikipedia