Junglefowl

Junglefowl are omnivorous, eating a variety of leaves, plant matter, invertebrates, and occasionally mice and frogs. They are large birds, with colourful plumage in males, but are often difficult to see in the dense vegetation they inhabit.

As with many birds in the pheasant family, the male takes no part in the incubation of the egg or rearing of the precocial young. These duties are performed by the drab and well-camouflaged female. Females and males do not form pair bonds.

Taxonomy

The genus Gallus was erected by the French scientist Mathurin Jacques Brisson in his Ornithologie published in 1760. The type species is the red junglefowl (Gallus gallus). The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus had introduced the genus Gallus in the 6th edition of his Systema Naturae published in 1748, but Linnaeus dropped the genus in the important tenth edition of 1758 and put the red junglefowl together with the common pheasant in the genus Phasianus. However, the red junglefowl and common pheasant are now known to have diverged about 18–23 million years ago, and belong to different subfamilies. This pairwise divergence time was also the same between the other three junglefowls and the pheasant. As the publication date of Linnaeus's sixth edition was before the 1758 starting point of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, Brisson and not Linnaeus is considered as the authority for the genus.

More recent phylogenetic evidence supports the closest relatives of Gallus being the bamboo partridges in the genus Bambusicola, from which they diverged about 15 million years ago.

Extant species

The genus contains four species.