Microtarsus is a genus of passerine birds in the bulbul family, Pycnonotidae, that are found in South and Southeast Asia.
GENUS
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Microtarsus is a genus of passerine birds in the bulbul family, Pycnonotidae, that are found in South and Southeast Asia.
==Taxonomy== The genus Microtarsus was introduced in 1839 by the English naturalist Thomas Campbell Eyton to accommodate a single species, Microtarsus melanoleucos Eyton, the black-and-white bulbul. This is the type species. The species now placed in this genus were formerly included in the genus Pycnonotus. A molecular phylogenetic study of the bulbul family published in 2017 found that Pycnonotus was polyphyletic. In the revision to create monophyletic genera Microtarsus was resurrected to contain the black-headed bulbul that was previously placed in Pycnonotus. In 2025 AviList adopted more inclusive genera and merged Brachypodius, Euptilotus and Poliolophus into Microtarsus.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).