Monophyly and phylogeny of cuckoos (Aves, Cuculidae) inferred from osteological characters
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A reanalysis of 32 characters from the literature previously deemed diagnostic of the Cuculidae revealed only five to be synapomorphic. I subsequently examined skeletons from 54 avian families and identified nine additional synapomorphies that supported cuckoo monophyly. My cladistic analysis of 33 cuculid genera using 135 skeletal characters differs markedly from currently accepted taxonomies. The most striking deviation is the placement of both New and Old World parasitic cuckoos in the Cuculinae, supporting the evolution of brood parasitism in a single event rather than three times as previously proposed. Unlike earlier classifications, the Cuculinae also includes the facultative parasites Coccyzus. This, suggests that the ancestral Coccyzus was an obligate parasite, and is consistent with the many behavioral adaptations to parasitism exhibited by this genus. Other changes include the placement of three subfamilies, comprising non-parasitic, terrestrial cuckoos of Old World (Centropodinae and Carpococcystinae) and New World (Neomorphinae) distribution, in basal positions on the tree. Nineteen characters support a sister relationship between the Hoatzin (Opisthocamus hoatzin Müller) and turacos (Musophagidae), and not cuckoos. Three synapomorphies of the os carpi ulnare were found to unite the Cuculidae, turacos, and the Hoatzin, suggesting that these three diverse taxa may constitute a monophyletic group.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".