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Limpkin
The limpkin (''Aramus guarauna''), also called carrao, courlan, and crying bird, is a bird that looks like a large rail but is skeletally closer to cranes. It is the only extant species in the genus ''Aramus'' and the family Aramidae. It is found mostly in wetlands in warm parts of the Americas, from Florida to northern Argentina. It feeds on molluscs, with the diet dominated by apple snails of the genus ''Pomacea''. Its name derives from its seeming limp when it walks.〔
==Taxonomy and systematics==
The limpkin is placed in its own monotypic family, Aramidae, which is in turn placed within the crane and rail order Gruiformes. It had been suggested that the limpkin was close to the ibis and spoonbill family Threskiornithidae, based upon shared bird lice. The Sibley–Ahlquist taxonomy of birds, based upon DNA–DNA hybridization, suggested that the limpkin's closest relatives were the Heliornithidae finfoots, and Sibley and Monroe even placed the species in that family in 1990.〔 More recent studies have found little support for this relationship.〔 More recent DNA studies have confirmed a close relationship with particularly the cranes,〔 with the limpkin remaining as a family close to the cranes and the two being sister taxa to the trumpeters.〔
Although the limpkin is the only extant species in the family today, there are several fossils of extinct Aramidae known from across the Americas. The earliest known species in the genus ''Aramus'', ''Aramus paludigrus'' is dated to the middle Miocene,〔 while the oldest supposed members of the family, ''Aminornis'' and ''Loncornis'', have been found in early Oligocene deposits in Argentina, although it is not certain that these are indeed related〔 – in fact ''Loncornis'' seems to be a misidentified mammal bone. Another Oligocene fossil from Europe, ''Parvigrus pohli'' (family Parvigruidae), has been described as a mosaic of the features shared by the limpkins and the cranes. It shares many morphological features with the cranes and limpkins, but also was much smaller than either group, and was more rail-like in its proportions. In the paper describing the fossil Gerald Mayr suggested that it was similar to the stem species of the grues (the cranes and limpkins), and that the limpkins evolved massively long bills as a result of the specialisation to feeding on snails. In contrast, the cranes evolved into long-legged forms to walk and probe on open grasslands.〔
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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