Ground hornbill

The ground hornbills are birds belonging to the genus, Bucorvus, in the hornbill family, Bucerotidae. The two species are endemic to open savanna regions of sub-Saharan Africa: the Abyssinian ground hornbill occurs in a belt from Senegal east to Ethiopia, and the southern ground hornbill occurs in southern and East Africa. The ground hornbills have sometimes been placed in a separate family, Bucorvidae.

Bucorvus
Male Abyssinian ground hornbill (Bucorvus abyssinicus)
Scientific classification
Domain:	Eukaryota
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Aves
Order:	Bucerotiformes
Family:	Bucerotidae
Genus:	Bucorvus Lesson, 1830
Type species
Buceros abyssinicus Boddaert, 1783

Ground hornbills are large, with adults around a metre tall. Both species are ground-dwelling, unlike other hornbills. They are carnivorous and feed on insects, snakes, other birds, amphibians and even tortoises.^[1]

Taxonomy

The genus Bucorvus was introduced in 1830, originally as a subgenus, by the French naturalist René Lesson to accommodate a single species, Buceros abyssinicus Boddaert, the Abyssinian ground hornbill. This is the type species.^[2][3] The generic name is a portmanteau of the genus Buceros introduced by Carl Linnaeus in 1758 for the Asian hornbills and corvus, the Latin word for a "raven".^[4]

A molecular phylogenetic study published in 2013 found that the genus Bucorvus was sister to the rest of the hornbills.^[5] The ground hornbills are estimated to have diverged from the other hornbills in the early Miocene, around 22 million years ago.^[6] The ground hornbills in the genus Bucorvus have sometimes been placed in a separate family, Bucorvidae.^[7]

The genus contains two species:^[8]

Image	Common name	Scientific name	Distribution
	Abyssinian ground hornbill	Bucorvus abyssinicus	Senegambia to Ethiopia, northern Uganda, and northeastern Kenya
	Southern ground hornbill	Bucorvus leadbeateri	savanna of eastern and southern Africa