The Species That Never Existed

Back in 2005, I wrote a piece called “Thinking About Species Loss” in which I suggested than when we talked about some “extinct” species, we might entertain the idea that the species never existed all.

“As odd as it may sound, even physical evidence of the existence of a species does not necessarily mean that this species has ever existed. Here, I am specifically talking about birds, where it turns out some ‘extinct’ species are based on single skins collected in the 19th or early 20th Century…. 

“The problem with birds is that they hybridize a lot, and bird species are not always very distinct from each other... [F]or example, there are several species of hummingbirds that we know of only due to single examples collected for the millenary trade. These so-called ‘Bogotá Skins’ (for their central shipping point out of South America to Europe) may in fact represent evidence of a new species of now extinct hummingbirds -- or they could simply represent hybrids of other hummingbirds. With about 10 percent of all bird species known to cross the ‘species barrier,’ it's hard to know.”

Now, it appears there is at least one clear example of what I suspected:

“Working from the skin Townsend collected in 1833, Parkes concluded in 1985 that Townsend's Bunting was not a distinct species at all.

“His theory: the bird was an aberrant Dickcissel, an individual missing the normal carotenoid pigment that would otherwise have produced the species' usual yellow-breasted, chestnut-shouldered look.”