Black-throated antbird

The black-throated antbird was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux in 1779.[3] The bird was also illustrated in a hand-coloured plate engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet in the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle which was produced under the supervision of Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text.[4] Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial name Formicarius attothorax in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées.[5] The species name is an error, the correct spelling is atrothorax. The type locality is the city of Cayenne in French Guiana.[6]

The black-throated antbird was usually placed in the genus Myrmeciza but a molecular phylogenetic study published in 2013 found that the genus was polyphyletic.[7] In the resulting rearrangement to create monophyletic genera the black-throated antbird was moved to the resurrected genus Myrmophylax which had originally been introduced the American ornithologist W. E. Clyde Todd in 1927.[8][9] The generic name Myrmophylax combines the Ancient Greek murmos meaning "ant" and phulax meaning "watcher" or "observer". The specific name atrothorax is from the Latin ater meaning "black" and thorax meaning "breast".[10]

Five subspecies are recognised.[8]

• M. a. metae (Meyer de Schauensee, 1947) – central Colombia
• M. a. atrothorax (Boddaert, 1783) – Venezuela, the Guianas and northeast Brazil
• M. a. tenebrosa (Zimmer, JT, 1932) – east Ecuador, northeast Peru and northwest Brazil
• M. a. maynana (Taczanowski, 1882) – north central Peru
• M. a. melanura (Ménétries, 1835) – east Peru, east, west Bolivia, southwest Brazil

• Image at ADW