Family: Pedionomidae
Description
The Plains-wanderer is the only species in this family.
Taxonomy
The bizarre Australian Plains-wanderer was formerly believed to be related to the buttonquails and thus placed in the gamebird order Galliformes or with the cranes and rails in Gruiformes. DNA-DNA hybridization and RAG-1 sequence data places it as a wader related to the jacanas (Sibley & Ahlquist 1990, Paton et al. 2003, Thomas et al. 2004, van Tuinen et al. 2004). It thus represents a remarkable case of morphological convergence.
| |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| |||||||||
