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The Lesser Antillean macaw or Guadeloupe macaw (''Ara guadeloupensis'') is an extinct species of macaw that is thought to have been endemic to the Lesser Antillean island region of Guadeloupe. In spite of the absence of conserved specimens, many details about the Lesser Antillean macaw are known from several contemporary accounts, and the bird may be the subject of some illustrations. It is therefore one of the best-documented species of extinct Caribbean macaw. Based on these accounts, Austin Hobart Clark named the species in 1905. A Pleistocene phalanx bone unearthed from the island of Marie-Galante confirmed the existence of a similar-sized macaw inhabiting the island prior to the arrival of humans, and was correlated with the Lesser Antillean macaw in 2015. According to contemporary descriptions, the body was red and the wings were red, blue and yellow. The tail feathers were between long. Apart from the smaller size and the all-red colouration of the tail feathers, it resembled the scarlet macaw of tropical South America and may therefore have been a close relative of that species. The bird ate fruitincluding those of the poisonous manchineel tree, was monogamous, nested in trees and laid two eggs twice a year. Early writers described it as being abundant in Guadeloupe, but it was becoming rare by 1760 and only survived in uninhabited areas. Disease and hunting by humans are thought to have eradicated it shortly after. The Lesser Antillean macaw is one of thirteen extinct macaw species that have been proposed to have lived in the Caribbean islands. Many of these species are now considered dubious because only three are known from physical remains, and there are no extant endemic macaws on the islands today. Macaws were frequently transported between the Caribbean islands and the South American mainland in both prehistoric and historic times, so it is impossible to know whether contemporaneous reports refer to imported or native species. ==Taxonomy== The Lesser Antillean macaw is well-documented compared to most other extinct Caribbean macaws, since it was mentioned and described by several contemporaneous writers.〔 Parrots thought to be the Lesser Antillean macaw were first mentioned by the Spanish historian Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés in 1553, referring to a 1496 account by Ferdinand Columbus, who mentioned parrots as big as chickens, which the Caribs called "Guacamayas", in Guadeloupe. In 1774, Comte de Buffon also stated that Christopher Columbus had found macaws in Guadeloupe. Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre gave the first detailed descriptions in 1654 and 1676, and illustrated the bird and other animals found in Guadeloupe, in the island group of the Lesser Antilles. Jean Baptiste Labat also described the bird in 1742.〔 Austin Hobart Clark gave the Lesser Antillean macaw its scientific name, ''Ara guadeloupensis'', in 1905, based on the contemporaneous accounts, but he also cited a 1765 colour plate as possibly depicting this species. He wrote that it was different in several features from the superficially similar scarlet macaw (''Ara macao''), as well as the green-winged macaw (''Ara chloropterus'') and the Cuban macaw (''Ara tricolor''). The ornithologist James Greenway wrote that the macaws reported from Guadeloupe could have been imported to the island from elsewhere by the natives, but this is impossible to prove.〔 According to the palaeontologist Julian Hume, its similarity to the scarlet macaw indicates that they are close relatives, and that the Guadeloupe species may have descended from the mainland macaw.〔 Greenway believed the scarlet macaw and the Cuban macaw formed a superspecies with the Lesser Antillean macaw and other hypothetical extinct species suggested for Jamaica and Hispaniola.〔 A small parrot ulna found on the Folle Anse archaeological site on Marie-Galante, an island in the Guadeloupe region, was assigned to the Lesser Antillean macaw by the ornithologists Matthew Williams and David Steadman in 2001. The ornithologists Storrs Olson and Edgar Maíz López cast doubt upon this identification, and proposed that the bone instead belonged to the extant imperial amazon (''Amazona imperialis''). The size and robustness of the bone was similar to ulnae of the imperial amazon, and though it was worn, the authors identified what appeared to be a notch, which is also present on ulnae of the genus ''Amazona'', but not in the genus ''Ara''. In the same paper, they also argued that another hypothetical extinct, sympatric parrot, the Guadeloupe amazon (''Amazona violacea''), was identical to the imperial amazon. Subfossil remains from the island of Montserrat have also been suggested to belong to the Lesser Antillean macaw.〔 In 2015, a terminal phalanx bone or ungual (claw bone) attributable to the genus ''Ara'' from Marie-Galante was described by Monica Gala and Arnaud Lenoble. It was discovered in the Blanchard Cave during excavations in 2013-2014, in a fossil-bearing deposit dating to the late Pleistocene epoch. The deposit was radiocarbon dated to about 10,690 years ago; the earliest evidence of human settlement in the area has been dated to 5.300 years ago. This confirmed that the Guadeloupe region once had an endemic macaw, which was not brought there as a result of human colonisation. All other macaw bones from the Lesser Antillean islands are from archaeological contexts, and could therefore have been the remains of birds brought there by Amerindians. The size of the phalanx bone matched what was described for the Lesser Antillean macaw by contemporary writers, and the authors therefore correlated the two, while admitting this could only be tentative, as there were no other remains of the bird to compare with. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Lesser Antillean macaw」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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