About Tauraco macrorhynchus (Fraser, 1839)
The yellow-billed turaco, scientifically named Tauraco macrorhynchus, is a bird species that belongs to the Musophagidae family. Its distribution covers Angola, Cameroon, the Republic of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ivory Coast, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. The yellow-billed turaco's range is discontinuous, a split caused by the drier climate of the Dahomey Gap that separates two morphologically distinct subspecies: T. m. macrorhynchus, found from Sierra Leone to Ghana, and T. m. verreauxii, found from Nigeria through the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Angola. Researchers have proposed that these two subspecies should be recognized as separate phylogenetic species, based on biogeography, morphology, and molecular phylogeny. It has also been proposed that the entire species should be moved to the genus Musophaga, because phylogenetic analyses do not recover it clustering with other Tauraco species.
