Malabar Pied Hornbill

About the Malabar Pied Hornbill

The Malabar pied hornbill (Anthracoceros coronatus), also known as the lesser pied hornbill, is a bird in the hornbill family, a family of tropical near-passerine birds found in the Old World. The Malabar pied hornbill 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-coloured 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 Buceros coronatus in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées. The Malabar pied hornbill is now placed in the genus Anthracoceros that was introduced by the German naturalist Ludwig Reichenbach in 1849. The species is monotypic. The generic name combines the Ancient Greek anthrax, meaning "coal black" and kerōs, meaning "horn". The specific epithet coronatus is Latin for "crowned".

The Malabar pied hornbill is a large hornbill, at 65... Wikipedia →