Geositta

Taxonomy

The genus Geositta was introduced in 1837 by the English naturalist William Swainson to accommodate a single species, Geositta anthoides which is therefore the type species by monotypy. Swainson formally described the type species in the following year in his Animals in Menageries. The name Geositta anthoides is considered as a junior synonym of Alauda fissirostris which had been described in 1835 by the German naturalist Heinrich von Kittlitz. The taxon is now treated as a subspecies of the common miner with the trinomial name Geositta cunicularia fissirostris. The genus name Geositta combines the Ancient Greek γεω-/geō- meaning "ground-" or "earth-" with the genus Sitta that had been introduced for the Eurasian nuthatch in 1758 by Carl Linnaeus.

The following cladogram showing the relationship between the species is based on a large molecular phylogenetic study of the suboscines by Michael Harvey and collaborators that was published in 2020.