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Population differences...

Some populations, like this one called erythrothorax, have a deeper green back. This one has a gray back. And they differ somewhat in the color of the throat. You noticed in the previous slide it was bright orange - yellow, really intense. And its intensity varied depending upon how the light struck it, because there's a little waxiness to the plummage of the throat and it can change color on you a little bit. But these forms were all different.

Well, we began looking at this and we discovered that this population of erythrothorax, is different from this population, gabonensis, and they're each other's closest relative. And here is our little new bird called sanghensis, after the Sangha River. This new species is related to a species that is very widely distributed in the Congo Basin. Now with the discovery of a new species, we are able now to come up with a hypothesis for the areas of endemism for Africa. My graduate student, Pamela Beresford, is doing her Ph.D. thesis on this and she's finding the same type of thing in other groups, that variation has been misunderstood because of the way people have classified species. She's beginning to look at these areas of endemism and how they might be related to one another.


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