Apus (bird)

Apus is a genus of birds in the family Apodidae.  They are called swifts in English.  Not all swifts are in genus Apus, but all birds in Apus are swifts.

Taxonomy
Italian naturalist Giovanni Antonio Scopoli made the genus Apus in 1777. He did it by looking at tautonymy and the common swift. Carl Linnaeus named the common swift Hirundo apus in 1758. The name Apus is Latin for a swift. The word is from Ancient Greek : α, a, "without," and πούς, pous, "foot."  People thought they were swallows without feet.

Before the 1950s, scientists disagreed about which animals should have the name Apus. In 1801, Bosc gave the small crustacean animals that we call Triops today the genus name Apus, and later writers continued to use it for them. In 1909, Keilhack said this was incorrect because there was already a group of birds called Apus. It was not until 1958 that the scientists in the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) decided to use the name for only birds.

Species

The genus has 20 species:

 Cape Verde swift, Apus alexandri
 Common swift, Apus apus
 Plain swift, Apus unicolor
 Nyanza swift, Apus niansae
 Pallid swift, Apus pallidus
 African black swift, Apus barbatus
 Malagasy black swift, Apus balstoni
 Fernando Po swift Apus sladeniae
 Forbes-Watson's swift, Apus berliozi
 Bradfield's swift, Apus bradfieldi
 Pacific swift, Apus pacificus
 Salim Ali's swift, Apus salimalii
 Blyth's swift, Apus leuconyx
 Cook's swift, Apus cooki
 Dark-rumped swift, Apus acuticauda
 Little swift, Apus affinis
 House swift, Apus nipalensis
 Horus swift, Apus horus
 White-rumped swift, Apus caffer
 Bates's swift Apus batesi

Some birds in Apus are dead.  Scientists learned about them from fossils, marks that their bones left in rocks:
Apus gaillardi (Middle/Late Miocene of La Grive-St.-Alban, France)
Apus wetmorei (Early - Late Pliocene? of SC and SE Europe)
Apus baranensis (Late Pliocene of SE Europe)
Apus submelba (Middle Pleistocene of Slovakia)

Scientists say the bird "Apus" ignotus is really in Procypseloides.

References

Category:Apodiformes