Kingdom Animalia Class Aves Family Rallidae Rank Species | Phylum Chordata Order Gruiformes Genus Gallirallus | |
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Similar Tahiti crake, Marquesas swamphen, North Island snipe, Saint Helena swamphen, Moorea sandpiper | ||
The Tongatapu rail (Gallirallus hypoleucus) was a species of bird in the family Rallidae. It was apparently native to the island of Tongatapu in the Kingdom of Tonga, in Polynesia in the south-west Pacific Ocean. It is known only from brief descriptions of a specimen, now lost, collected from Tongatapu in 1777 in the course of James Cook’s third voyage to the Pacific, and from a contemporary illustration by Georg Forster.
References
Tongatapu rail Wikipedia(Text) CC BY-SA