Colpocephalum

Colpocephalum is a genus of chewing louse. Christian Ludwig Nitzsch named the genus in 1818. The Plenary Powers of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature selected Colpocephalum zebra as its type species in the 1950s. There are approximately 135 species in this genus, and they are ectoparasites of birds in at least a dozen different orders.

==Taxonomic history and the type species== thumb|upright=.67|Redi's 1671 plate. Nitzsch gave the name L. (C.) ochraceum to the species illustrated on the top. Colpocephalum was circumscribed by Christian Ludwig Nitzsch in 1818. Nitzsch classified this taxon as a subgenus of the genus Liotheum. He included four species, which in his taxonomy were called L. (C.) zebra, L. (C.) flavescens, L. (C.) subaequale, and L. (C.) ochraceum. The first three species were nomina nuda; only the last was accompanied with an indication to a previously published illustration, namely a 17th-century illustration by Francesco Redi. He wrote the indication as "Pulex avis pluvialis Redi exp. fig. sup." In order to keep this name valid, Theresa Clay and George Henry Evans Hopkins restricted Carl Linnaeus's 1758 name Pediculus charadrii to only the bottom figure of Redi's plate. Strictly applying the ICZN Code, the type species should have been Liotheum (Colpocephalum) ochraceum, as it was the only available name included in the original circumscription.