Apus (bird)
The bird genus Apus comprise some of the Old World members of the family Apodidae, commonly known as swifts. They are among the fastest birds in the world. They resemble swallows, to which they are not related, but have shorter tails and sickle-shaped wings. Swifts spend most of their life aloft, have very short legs and use them mostly to cling to surfaces. Taxonomy. The genus "Apus" was erected by the Italian naturalist Giovanni Antonio Scopoli in 1777 based on tautonymy and the common swift which had been given the binomial name "Hirundo apus" by the Swedish  naturalist Carl Linnaeus in 1758. The name "Apus" is Latin for a swift, thought by the ancients to be a type of swallow with no feet (from Ancient Greek α, "a", "without", and πούς, "pous", "foot"). Before the 1950s, there was some controversy over which group of organism should have the genus name "Apus". In 1801, Bosc gave the small crustacean organisms, known today as "Triops," the genus name "Apus," and later authors continued to use this term. Keilhack suggested (in 1909) that this was incorrect since there was already an avian genus named "Apus" by Scopoli in 1777 . It  was not until 1958 that the controversy finally ended when the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) ruled against the use of the genus name "Apus" for the crustaceans and instead recognized the term "Triops". Species. The genus contains 20 species: Known fossil species are: The Miocene ""Apus" ignotus" is now placed in "Procypseloides".