The violet-necked lory was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1780 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux from a specimen obtained from the island of Gebe in the Maluku Islands of eastern Indonesia.[2] The bird was also illustrated in a hand-coloured plate engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet in the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle which was produced under the supervision of Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text.[3] Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial namePsittacus squamatus in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées.[4] The violet-necked lory is now placed in the genusEos that was introduced by the German naturalist Johann Georg Wagler in 1832.[5][6] The genus name is from the Ancient Greekeōs meaning "dawn". The specific epithet squamata is from the Latin squamatus meaning "scaled".[7]
E. s. squamata (Boddaert, 1783) – west Papuan islands
Description
The violet-necked lory is 27 cm (11 in) long. It bears a strong resemblance to the female eclectus parrot except it has an orange-yellow beak. It is mostly red and blue with a blue abdomen. its extent of blue neck collar depends on subspecies. It has red and black in wings and a purple-red tail.[8]
^ abGill, Frank; Donsker, David, eds. (2019). "Parrots, cockatoos". World Bird List Version 9.2. International Ornithologists' Union. Retrieved 12 August 2019.
Species (taxonomy note: * indicates taxa that may classified as a subspecies of the rainbow lorikeet or a separate species) (extinctions: † indicates a species confirmed to be extinct, ₴ indicates evidence only from sub-fossils)