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Giant Kingfisher

Megaceryle maxima

Classification

Class
Aves

The giant kingfisher (Megaceryle maxima) is the largest kingfisher in Africa, where it is a resident breeding bird over most of the continent south of the Sahara Desert, other than the arid southwest. Taxonomy The first formal description of the giant kingfisher was by the German naturalist Peter Simon Pallas in 1769 under the binomial name Alcedo maxima. The current genus Megaceryle was erected by the German naturalist Johann Jakob Kaup in 1848.

Distribution

(c) Shaun Swanepoel, some rights reserved (CC BY) · CC-BY
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Countries in the Picchu catalog
United States of America · 1