Taxonomical reappraisal of Cathayornithidae (Aves: Enantiornithes)

Abstract

A complete redescription of Cathayornis caudatus Hou, 1997 is provided based on new information from a resin cast of the holotype, leading to reinterpretation of many morphological features of this initially poorly diagnosed taxon. Detailed comparisons across various specimens referred to Cathayornithidae Zhou et al., 1992 indicate that Sinornis santensis, Cathayornis yandica, C. caudatus and Eocathayornis walkeri are valid taxa, but that C. chabuensis should be regarded as a nomen dubium. The holotype and referred specimens of C. chabuensis differ significantly in morphology, indicating that they do not belong to the same species. A comprehensive phylogenetic analysis targeted at Mesozoic birds reveals that neither Cathayornithidae Zhou et al., 1992 nor Cathayornis Zhou et al., 1992 are monophyletic, and that C. yandica can be regarded as the only species in a monospecific Cathayornithidae. The holotype of ‘C. caudatus’ is assigned to the genus Houornis gen. nov., and a taxonomic reassessment of other ‘cathayornithids’ is presented.

http://zoobank.org/urn:lsid:zoobank.org:pub:0B1A404A-CC6A-4609-8CC5-C0DD62983C9A

Keywords:

• Cathayornis
• Cathayornithidae
• Early Cretaceous
• Jehol Biota
• taxonomy

Acknowledgements

We thank C. Sullivan for editing and commenting on the manuscript; Xinzhen Liu for making the resin cast of Cathayornis caudatus (IVPP V10917), and Jie Zhang for taking the photographs. We also thank Yuguang Zhang for providing the photograph of OFMB-3 and discussing this specimen with us. We are grateful to Diego Pol for help with constrained searches in the TNT software. We thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions for improving the manuscript. This work was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) under Grant no. 2012CB821906 and the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant no. 41172020.

Supplemental material

Supplemental material for this article can be accessed here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14772019.2014.994087