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 ()

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.

Citation

Jones, C. G., Jackson, H. A., McGowan, R. Y., Hume, J. P., Forshaw, J. M., Tatayah, V. , Winters, R. and Groombridge, J. J. (2019), A parakeet specimen held at National Museums Scotland is a unique skin of the extinct Réunion Parakeet Psittacula eques eques: a reply to Cheke and Jansen (). Ibis, 161: 230-238. doi:10.1111/ibi.12673

Type

Journal Article

Item Description

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Jones, C. G., Jackson, H. A., McGowan, R. Y., Hume, J. P., Forshaw, J. M., Tatayah, V. , Winters, R. and Groombridge, J. J. (2019), A parakeet specimen held at National Museums Scotland is a unique skin of the extinct Réunion Parakeet Psittacula eques eques: a reply to Cheke and Jansen (). Ibis, 161: 230-238. doi:10.1111/ibi.12673, which has been published in final form at doi:10.1111/ibi.12673. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.
NHM Repository

ISSN

0019-1019

EISSN

1474-919X