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The Rodrigues rail or Leguat's gelinote (''Erythromachus leguati'') is an extinct, flightless rail that was endemic to the Mascarene island of Rodrigues, east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. It was described as having grey plumage, a red beak, red legs, and a naked red patch around the eye. The beak varied between specimens from straight to curved, but the reason for this is unknown. It is sometimes assigned to the genus ''Aphanapteryx'', along with its close relative the red rail of Mauritius, but they are commonly kept separate. Its relationship with other rails is unclear. It was described as being attracted to red objects, which humans exploited while hunting it. The Rodrigues rail is believed to have become extinct in the mid-18th century because of destruction of its habitat and predation by humans and introduced animals. Apart from information gathered from subfossil bones, the bird is poorly understood and is only known from two contemporaneous descriptions, and there are no extant illustrations of it. The bird was first described by François Leguat, a French Huguenot refugee marooned on Rodrigues in 1691, and was named ''leguati'' in his honour. The second description is by Julien Tafforet, also marooned on the island in 1726. Subfossil remains were first described and connected with the extant descriptions in 1874. == Taxonomy == In 1848, Hugh Strickland wrote that a bird similar to the red rail of Mauritius was mentioned in François Leguat's memoirs, but was unable to classify it further because of a lack of remains. He wrote that it may have been a grouse or gallinaceous bird. In 1874, Alphonse Milne-Edwards connected Leguat's and Tafforet's descriptions with some bones found in a cave on Rodrigues, and recognised their similarity to those of the red rail. Milne-Edwards coined the generic name ''Erthyromachus'' from the Greek words for "red" and "battle", in reference to its behaviour towards red objects, and the specific name is in honour of Leguat. The junior synonym ''Miserythrus'', from "red" and "hatred", was coined by Alfred Newton in 1893, also referring to this behaviour. James Greenway wrote that Leguat's description referred to wind-blown purple swamphen. This has not been accepted by other authors. More remains were found in 1974. Unlike the red rail and other extinct Mascarene birds, the Rodrigues rail was not illustrated by contemporaneous artists. Ornithologist Storrs L. Olson described reconstructions made for Walter Rothschild's book ''Extinct Birds'' (1907) and Masauji Hachusika's ''The Dodo and kindred birds'' (1953) as "rather fanciful". Frederick William Frohawk based his restoration in the former book on an outline sketch, which was in turn based on a 17th-century sketch drawn by Sir Thomas Herbert, which is now known to depict the red rail. Hermann Schlegel thought it depicted a species of dodo (''Didus herbertii'') from Rodrigues when he drew the outline in 1854, and that it was the species mentioned by Leguat. 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「Rodrigues rail」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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