The Mangaia crake ("Porzana" rua) is an extinct species of flightless bird in the rail family, Rallidae. It was described in 1986 from subfossil bones of late Holocene age found in caves on the island of Mangaia, in the southern Cook Islands of East Polynesia.[1] It was placed in the then-loosely circumscribed genus Porzana, but it almost certainly does not belong to Porzana proper as understood in modern times. Rather, it most likely was one of the crakes which are now separated as genus Zapornia. While the species survived for hundreds of years of Polynesian settlement, even despite the establishment of introduced predators, at some point in the last millennium Mangaia suffered an ecosystem collapse with far-reaching consequences, the extinction of "P." rua among them.
The species name rua is Cook Islands Māori for a hole in the ground, such as a sinkhole, a grave, a chasm or a cavern. It alludes to the name of the type locality, Te Rua Rere ("The Flying/Jumping/Throwing Cave"), als well to the fact that the prehistoric deposits of Mangaia were metaphorical "graveyards" of extinct fauna, with this rail being one of the most numerous. The holotype specimen USNM 402876 is one humerus and two tarsometatarsus bones all belonging to the same bird. They were collected on April 13, 1984.[1]
^ abcSteadman, D. W. (1986). "Two new species of rails (Aves: Rallidae) from Mangaia, Southern Cook Islands". Pacific Science. 40 (1): 27–43.
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