Brazilian Ruby

About the Brazilian Ruby

The Brazilian ruby (Heliodoxa rubricauda) is a species of hummingbird in the "brilliants", tribe Heliantheini, in the subfamily Lesbiinae. It is endemic to Brazil. The Brazilian ruby was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, in 1780 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux. The bird was also illustrated in a hand-colored plate engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet in the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle which was produced under the supervision of Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text. Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial name Trochilus rubicauda in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées. The type locality is Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

The Brazilian ruby was at one time the only species in the genus Clytolaema that was introduced by the ornithologist and bird artist John Gould in 1853. However, a 2014 publication provided evidence that Clytolaema is embedded within the genus Heliodoxa. The South American Classification Committee of the American Ornithological Society (SACC) and the International... Wikipedia →