Palm Cockatoo

About the Palm Cockatoo

The palm cockatoo (Probosciger aterrimus), also known as the goliath cockatoo or great black cockatoo, is a large, smoky-grey/black parrot of the cockatoo family native to New Guinea, the Aru Islands and the Cape York Peninsula in Queensland, Australia. It has a crest of long feathers atop its head, with a very large and strong, sharply-hooked black beak (with which it can easily open nuts and seeds), and prominent bright-red cheek patches.

The palm cockatoo was formally described in 1788 by naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae, in which he classified the bird with other parrots in the genus Psittacus and coined the binomial name Psittacus aterrimus. Gmelin based his description on the "black cockatoo" that had been described and illustrated in 1764 by English naturalist George Edwards. Joan Gideon Loten had provided Edwards with a drawing of the bird by the Sri Lankan artist Pieter Cornelis de Bevere; the original drawing by de Bere is in the collection of the Natural History Museum, London.

The palm cockatoo is, now, the only species within the genus Probosciger that was introduced by Heinrich Kuhl... Wikipedia →