Plain-breasted Ground-Dove

About the Plain-breasted Ground-Dove

The plain-breasted ground dove (Columbina minuta) is a species of bird in the family Columbidae. It lacks the scaled appearance to the feathers of the similar and typically more abundant common ground dove. In 1760 the French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson included a description of the plain-breasted ground dove in his six volume Ornithologie based on a specimen that he mistakenly believed had been collected in Santo Domingo of the Dominican Republic. He used the French name La petite tourterelle brune d'Amérique and the Latin Turtur parvus fuscus americanus. 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. One of these was the plain-breasted ground dove which he placed with the other pigeons in the genus Columba. Linnaeus included a brief description, coined the binomial name Columba minuta and cited Brisson's work. The specific name minuta is from the Latin minutus meaning "small"... Wikipedia →