Nightjars are medium-sized nocturnal or crepuscular birds in the family Caprimulgidae and order Caprimulgiformes, characterised by long wings, short legs, and very short bills. They are sometimes called goatsuckers, due to the ancient folk tale that they sucked the milk from goats, or bugeaters, their primary source of food being insects. Some New World species are called nighthawks. The English word "nightjar" originally referred to the European nightjar.
The Sibley–Ahlquist taxonomy is a bird taxonomy proposed by Charles Sibley and Jon E. Ahlquist. It is based on DNA–DNA hybridization studies conducted in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s.
Traditionally, the bird order Apodiformes contained three living families: the swifts (Apodidae), the treeswifts (Hemiprocnidae), and the hummingbirds (Trochilidae). In the Sibley-Ahlquist taxonomy, this order is raised to a superorder Apodimorphae in which hummingbirds are separated as a new order, Trochiliformes. With nearly 450 species identified to date, they are the most diverse order of birds after the passerines.
The frogmouths (Podargidae) are a group of nocturnal birds related to owlet-nightjars, swifts, and hummingbirds. Species in the group are distributed in the Indomalayan and Australasian realms.
St Bathans, formerly named Dunstan Creek, is a former gold and coal mining town in Central Otago, New Zealand. The settlement was a centre of the Otago Gold Rush, but mining has since long ceased. It is now largely a holiday retreat due to the preservation of many of its historic buildings.
The New Caledonian owlet-nightjar, also known as the enigmatic owlet-nightjar, is a large owlet-nightjar with vermiculated grey-brown and black plumage. It has a long, slightly rounded tail, short, rounded wings, and long, stout legs. Its voice is unknown, but other owlet-nightjar species make churring and whistling sounds. It is the second-largest known owlet-nightjar, much larger than the Australian owlet-nightjar.
The New Zealand owlet-nightjar is an extinct, comparatively large species of owlet-nightjar formerly endemic to the islands of New Zealand. Fossil remains indicate the species was once widespread across both the North Island and the South Island.
Collocalia is a genus of swifts, containing some of the smaller species termed "swiftlets". Formerly a catch-all genus for these, a number of its former members are now normally placed in Aerodramus.
The mountain owlet-nightjar is a species of bird in the family Aegothelidae. It is found in the highlands of New Guinea. Its natural habitat is subtropical or tropical moist montane forests.
The barred owlet-nightjar is a species of bird in the owlet-nightjar family Aegothelidae. It is found in New Guinea. The species was originally thought to be the same species as the Australian owlet-nightjar, until that species was found within the range of the barred owlet-nightjar. It was also considered to be the same species as the Vogelkop owlet-nightjar. There are three subspecies, the nominate, from south-eastern New Guinea, A. b. wiedenfeldi from northern New Guinea, and A. b. plumifer from the D’Entrecasteaux Islands.
Wallace's owlet-nightjar is a species of bird in the family Aegothelidae. It is found in New Guinea.
Paleontology or palaeontology is the study of prehistoric life forms on Earth through the examination of plant and animal fossils. This includes the study of body fossils, tracks (ichnites), burrows, cast-off parts, fossilised feces (coprolites), palynomorphs and chemical residues. Because humans have encountered fossils for millennia, paleontology has a long history both before and after becoming formalized as a science. This article records significant discoveries and events related to paleontology that occurred or were published in the year 1968.
Apodimorphae is a clade of strisorean birds that include the extant families Trochilidae (hummingbirds), Hemiprocnidae (treeswifts), Apodidae (swifts), and Aegothelidae (owlet-nightjars), as well as many fossil families. This grouping of birds has been supported in a variety of recent studies. There are two higher classification schemes that have been proposed for the apodimorph families. One is all strisorean birds are classified in the order Caprimulgiformes, while the other is the strisorean birds are split into several distinct orders. In this case Apodimorphae is a subclade of Strisores that includes the orders Aegotheliformes and the Apodiformes. A similar name for the group Daedalornithes has been used for the owlet-night-apodiform clade, there is a difference between the two names with Apodimorphae defined as the total-group and Daedalornithes defined as the crown group.
Strisores, sometimes called nightbirds, is a clade of birds that includes the living families and orders Caprimulgidae, Nyctibiidae (potoos), Steatornithidae (oilbirds), Podargidae (frogmouths), Apodiformes, as well as the Aegotheliformes (owlet-nightjars) whose distinctness was only recently realized. The Apodiformes and the Aegotheliformes form the Daedalornithes.
Miotadorna is a genus of extinct tadornine ducks from the Miocene of New Zealand. It contains two species, M. sanctibathansi, and M. catrionae.
Pikaihao bartlei, also referred to as Bartle's bittern or the Saint Bathans bittern, is a genus and species of prehistoric small bittern from the Early Miocene of New Zealand. It was described in 2013 from fossil material found in the Saint Bathans Fauna of the Bannockburn Formation, at Home Hills Station in the Manuherikia River valley of Otago, South Island. It was a contemporary of the much larger Saint Bathans heron, remains of which have been found in the same sediments. The genus name Pikaihao comes from the Māori pi and kaihao (“fisherman”). The specific epithet honours Sandy Bartle, Curator of Birds at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa from 1976 to 2009.
The Manuherikia Group is a fluvial-lacustrine sedimentary fill in the Central Otago area of New Zealand, at the site of the prehistoric Lake Manuherikia. The area consists of a valley and ridge topography, with a series of schist-greywacke mountains at roughly ninety degrees to each other. The Manuherika Group occurs in the current basins, and occasionally on the mountains themselves.
Vanescaves is a probable clade of strisorean birds that include the clades Steatornithiformes, Nyctibiiformes, Podargiformes (frogmouths), and Apodimorphae. Some molecular studies do support the grouping of these birds, others offer conflicting positions of the non-apodimorphaean strisoreans. In 2019 the authors Chen et al. performed a combined analysis using 2289 ultra-conserved elements [UCEs], 117 morphological characters from extant and fossil taxa found support in this clade. The authors then proposed to name this group, which its meaning is Latin for "vanish birds" in reference to the disparate nature of their geographic distribution, as well as to the poem "A Route of Evanescence" by the American poet Emily Dickinson which features a hummingbird as the main subject. In 2020 Chen & Field named the two major subclades of this group, with Sedentaves and Letornithes for their crown-groups.
