Study: Golden-crowned manakins are 'exceedingly rare' hybrid

The bird was first discovered in 1957 in Brazil and had gone unseen again until 2002.

Researchers determined the bird was a hybrid after examining the keratin structure of its feathers using an electron microscope. It has a mixture of keratin structures from both parental species, the snow-capped manakin, which has bright, snowy-white crown feathers, and the opal-crowned manakin, which has brilliant, iridescent crown feathers.

Scientists believe the male golden-crowned manakin initially had duller white or gray feathers, but evolved yellow feathers in order to attract females. They published their findings in the December issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"The golden-crowned manakin ended up with an intermediate keratin structure that does a poor job of making either the brilliant white or the reflective iridescence of the parental species," said senior author Jason Weir, an associate professor at University of Toronto Scarborough.

By looking at the golden-crowned manakin's genome, scientists could see it shared 20 percent of its genome with the snowy-crowned manakin and 80 percent with the opal-crowned manakin.

They determined the golden-crowned bird split from its parental species 180,000 years ago. The parental species split from their common ancestors about 300,000 years ago, which the researchers said was a short amount of time compared to other Amazon rainforest species.

"Most Amazon bird species diverged from their most recent relative around 1.5 [million] to 4 million years ago, so these are all young birds by comparison," Weir said. "While hybrid plant species are very common, hybrid species among vertebrates are exceedingly rare."

He said the golden-crowned manakin likely survived as a species due to geographical isolation from its parental species. The bird lives in an area of the south-central Amazon rainforest separated from where its parental species live by wide rivers, which the birds are reluctant to cross.

"Without geographic isolation, it's very likely this would never have happened because you don't see the hybrids evolving as separate species in other areas where both parental species meet," Weir said.