Variegated Tinamou

About the Variegated Tinamou

The variegated tinamou (Crypturellus variegatus) is a type of tinamou commonly found in moist forest lowlands in subtropical and tropical regions of northern South America. The variegated tinamou was formally described in 1789 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae. He placed it with all the other quail like birds in the genus Tetrao and coined the binomial name Tetrao variegatus. Gmelin based his description on the Le Tinamou varié that had been described in 1778 by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon and also illustrated in a separate publication. The variegated tinamou is now placed with around twenty other tinamou in the genus Crypturellus that was introduced in 1914 by the British ornithologists Baron Brabourne and Charles Chubb. The genus name combines the Ancient Greek κρυπτός (kruptós) meaning "hidden" with οὐρά (oura) meaning "tail". The -ellus is a diminutive so that the name means "small hidden tail". The specific epithet variegatus is Latin meaning "variegated". The cinereous tinamou is monotypic: no subspecies are recognised.

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