The genus
Tinamus was introduced in 1783 by the French naturalist
Johann Hermann. He placed a single species in the genus,
Tinamus soui, the
little tinamou. Hermann based the genus name on "Les Tinamous" used by
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in his
Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux. The word "Tinamú" in the
Carib language of French Guiana was used for the tinamous. In 1790 the English ornithologist
John Latham introduced a genus with the same name,
Tinamus, also based on Buffon's work, and included five species in the genus. He did not specify the
type species but in 1840 the English zoologist
George Gray designated the type of
Tetranus as
Tetrao major Gmelin, 1789 and attributed the genus to Latham (1790) and not to Hermann (1783). Although ornithologists realised that
Tetranus Hermann, 1783 was earlier and therefore had priority, the type species was accepted as
Tetrao major. In 2025 Sara Bertelli and collaborators pointed out that under the rules of the
International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), the type species should be
Tinamus soui by monotypy. This species is now placed in a different genus,
Crypturellus. Bertelli and collaborators proposed that the species currently placed in the genus
Crypturellus should be moved to
Tetranus with
Tinamus soui as the type, while the species currently placed in
Tetranus should be moved to a resurrected genus
Pezus that had been introduced in 1825 by the German naturalist
Johann Baptist von Spix. The type species of
Pezus was fixed as
Tinamus major by Gray in 1840. In 2025 a potentially new species of tinamou, the slaty-masked tinamou (
Tinamus resonans) was described from the
Sierra del Divisor in the Brazilian state of
Acre. ==References==