White-bellied Tanager Tangara brasiliensis is split from Turquoise Tanager Tangara mexicana (Clements 2007:659)

Summary: Southeastern Brazil now has yet another beautiful endemic species of tanager, the White-bellied Tanager.

Details: As with two other forms long treated as subspecies of Tangara mexicana (Storer 1970), T. brasiliensis was first described as a separate species but lumped following Zimmer (1943), who stated “I believe the relationship is sufficiently close to warrant the use of a trinomial, with the added advantage of indicating the affinity of mexicana and brasiliensis in distinction from the other members of the genus Tangara”. On the basis of marked plumage and size differences, coupled with moderate mtDNA divergence (Burns and Naoki 2004), Mallet-Rodriguez and Gonzaga (2015) and del Hoyo and Collar (2016) considered T. brasiliensis a separate species; and WGAC and Clements et al. (2023) now align with this treatment. Gill and Wright (2006, IOC v.1.0–1.6) treated T. brasiliensis as specifically distinct, but from IOC v.3.1–13.1 it was considered a subspecies, once again being treated as a species in Gill et al. (2023, IOC 13.2).