The name
Gallinago was introduced by French zoologist
Mathurin Jacques Brisson in 1760 as a subdivision of the
genus Scolopax. Brisson did not use
Carl Linnaeus's
binomial system of nomenclature and although many of Brisson's genera had been adopted by ornithologists, his subdivision of genera were generally ignored. Instead, the erection of the genus
Gallinago for the
snipes was credited to German zoologist
Carl Ludwig Koch in a book published in 1816. But in 1920 it was discovered that the German naturalist Johann Samuel Traugott Frenzel had erected the genus
Capella for the snipes in 1801. As his publication antedated Koch's use of
Gallinago, it took precedence. The
American Ornithologists' Union switched to
Capella in 1921 and in 1934, American ornithologist
James L. Peters used
Capella for the woodcocks in his influential
Check-list of Birds of the World. This all changed in 1956, when the
International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature ruled that
Gallinago Brisson 1760 should have priority for the genus, with the
common snipe as the
type species. The scientific name
gallinago is
Neo-Latin for a
woodcock or
snipe from
Latin gallina, "hen", and the suffix
-ago, "resembling". The genus contains 18 species: This genus contains the majority of the world's snipe
species, the other two extant genera being
Coenocorypha, with three species, and
Lymnocryptes, the jack snipe. Morphologically, they are all similar, with a very long, slender bill and cryptic
plumage. Most have distinctive displays, usually given at dawn or dusk. They search for
invertebrates in the mud with a "sewing-machine" action of their long bills. Fossil bones of some undescribed
Gallinago species most similar to the
great snipe have been recovered in Late
Miocene or Early
Pliocene deposits (around 5
mya) of Lee Creek Mine, USA. The large
West Indian species
Gallinago kakuki went extinct during the late
Quaternary period, and despite its distribution, it may actually be more closely related to Old World snipe species than New World ones. ==References==