Red-capped Cardinal

About the Red-capped Cardinal

The red-capped cardinal (Paroaria gularis) is a small species of bird in the tanager family Thraupidae. It is found in South America. In 1760 the French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson included a description of the red-capped cardinal in the supplement to his Ornithologie based on a specimen collected in "America". He used the French name Le cardinal d'Amérique and the Latin name Cardinalis americanis. Although Brisson coined Latin names, these do not conform to the binomial system and are not recognised by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. When in 1766 the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus updated his Systema Naturae for the twelfth edition he added 240 species that had been previously described by Brisson in his Ornithologie. One of these was the red-capped cardinal. Linnaeus included a terse description, coined the binomial name Tanagra gularis and cited Brisson's work. The specific name gularis is Latin for "of the throat". The type locality has been restricted to French Guiana. This species is now placed in the genus Paroaria that was introduced by the French ornithologist Charles Lucien Bonaparte in 1832.

The genus Paroaria is classified... Wikipedia →