The golden-naped tanager was illustrated by the French naturalists
Florent Prévost and
Marc Athanase Parfait Oeillet Des Murs in 1842. They coined the
binomial name Tanagra ruficervix. The
type locality is
Bogotá in Colombia. The specific epithet combines the Latin
rufus meaning "red" and
cervix meaning "nape". A
molecular phylogenetic study published in 2014 found that
Tangara was
polyphyletic and in the rearrangement to create
monophyletic genera, the golden-naped tanager was moved to the resurrected genus
Chalcothraupis. The genus had originally been introduced by the French naturalist
Charles Lucien Bonaparte in 1851 with the golden-naped tanager as the
type species. The genus name combines the
Ancient Greek khalkos meaning "bronze" and
thraupis, an unidentified small bird. Six
subspecies are recognised: •
C. r. ruficervix (Prévost & Des Murs, 1842) – Colombia •
C. r. leucotis (
Sclater, PL, 1851) – west Ecuador •
C. r. taylori (
Taczanowski &
Berlepsch, 1885) – southeast Colombia, east Ecuador and north Peru •
C. r. amabilis (
Zimmer, JT, 1943) – north to central Peru •
C. r. inca (
Parkes, 1969) – south Peru •
C. r. fulvicervix (Sclater, PL &
Salvin, 1876) – southeast Peru and west Bolivia ==Description==