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The Alagoas Curassow, Mitu mitu, is a large, up to 89 cm long, pheasant
Pheasant

Pheasants are a group of large birds in the order Galliformes.Pheasants are characterised by strong sexual dimorphism, with males being highly ornate with bright colours and adornments such as wattle and long tails....
-like bird with a whitish-tipped red bill
Beak

The beak, bill or rostrum is an external anatomical structure of birds which, in addition to eating, is used for Personal grooming#In animals, manipulating objects, killing prey, probing for food, Courtship#Courtship in the animal kingdom and feeding their young....
, black glossed purplish blue plumage, chestnut under-belly, reddish brown iris
Iris (anatomy)

The iris is a membrane in the eye, responsible for controlling the amount of light reaching the retina. The iris consists of pigmented fibrovascular tissue known as a stroma of iris....
 and fourteen pale brown-tipped tail feathers. It has a unique bare greyish crescent-shaped ear patch not found in other curassow
Curassow

Curassows are one of the three major groups of cracidae birds. Three of the four genus are restricted to tropical South America; a single species of Crax ranges north to Mexico....
s. The female is slightly lighter than the male. Its diet consists mainly of fruits. They can reach an age of more than 24 years in captivity.

The rare Alagoas Curassow was first mentioned by German
Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands....
 naturalist Georg Marcgraf in his work Historia Naturalis Brasiliae which was published in 1648.






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The Alagoas Curassow, Mitu mitu, is a large, up to 89 cm long, pheasant
Pheasant

Pheasants are a group of large birds in the order Galliformes.Pheasants are characterised by strong sexual dimorphism, with males being highly ornate with bright colours and adornments such as wattle and long tails....
-like bird with a whitish-tipped red bill
Beak

The beak, bill or rostrum is an external anatomical structure of birds which, in addition to eating, is used for Personal grooming#In animals, manipulating objects, killing prey, probing for food, Courtship#Courtship in the animal kingdom and feeding their young....
, black glossed purplish blue plumage, chestnut under-belly, reddish brown iris
Iris (anatomy)

The iris is a membrane in the eye, responsible for controlling the amount of light reaching the retina. The iris consists of pigmented fibrovascular tissue known as a stroma of iris....
 and fourteen pale brown-tipped tail feathers. It has a unique bare greyish crescent-shaped ear patch not found in other curassow
Curassow

Curassows are one of the three major groups of cracidae birds. Three of the four genus are restricted to tropical South America; a single species of Crax ranges north to Mexico....
s. The female is slightly lighter than the male. Its diet consists mainly of fruits. They can reach an age of more than 24 years in captivity.

The rare Alagoas Curassow was first mentioned by German
Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands....
 naturalist Georg Marcgraf in his work Historia Naturalis Brasiliae which was published in 1648. Because of lack of information and specimen, it was considered the same species with the Razor-billed Curassow
Razor-billed Curassow

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, until after its rediscovery in 1951 in the Alagoas
Alagoas

Alagoas is a small States of Brazil in northeastern Brazil lying between the states of Pernambuco and Sergipe; touching the state of Bahia along a part of its southwestern border....
 lowland forests, Brazil
Brazil

Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is a country in South America. It is the List of countries and outlying territories by total area country by geographical area, occupying nearly half of South America, the List of countries by population country, and the fourth most populous democracy in the world....
. Following the review of Pereira & Baker (2004), they are today believed to be a fairly basal
Basal (phylogenetics)

In phylogenetics, a basal clade is the earliest clade to branch in a larger clade; it appears at the base of a cladogram.A basal group form an outgroup to the rest of the clade, such as in the following example:...
 lineage of its genus and closer to the Crestless Curassow
Crestless Curassow

This article was auto-generated by...
, the other Mitu species with brown eumelanin in the tail tips. Its lineage is distinct since the Miocene
Miocene

The Miocene is a Geologic time scale of the Neogene period and extends from about 23.03 to 5.33 million years before the present. As with other older geologic periods, the rock beds that define the start and end are well identified but the exact dates of the start and end of the period are uncertain....
-Pliocene
Pliocene

The Pliocene epoch is the period in the geologic timescale that extends from 5.332 million to 1.806 million years before present.The Pliocene is the second epoch of the Neogene period in the Cenozoic era....
 boundary (little more than 5 million years ago), when it became isolated in the Mata Atlāntica
Mata Atlāntica

The Atlantic Forest is a region of Tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests, tropical and subtropical dry broadleaf forests, tropical and subtropical grasslands, savannas, and shrublandss, and Mangrove which extends along the Atlantic Ocean coast of Brazil from Rio Grande do Norte state in the north to Rio Grande do Sul state in the...
 refugium (Pereira & Baker 2004).

Due to ongoing habitat loss, overhunting and very small population size, the Alagoas Curassow is evaluated as Extinct in the Wild on the IUCN Red List
IUCN Red List

The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species , created in 1963, is the world's most comprehensive inventory of the global Conservation movement status of plant and animal species....
 of Threatened Species. The last wild Alagoas Curassow was seen and killed in 1984, and possibly 1987 or 1988. The captive population has been extensively hybridized with the Razor-billed Curassow, and there are a few dozen purebred birds left. These are being maintained and bred in two privately-owned professional aviaries mainly due to lack of official interest owing to the long-standing doubt about the taxon's validity.

The Alagoas Curassow is protected under Brazilian law and is listed on Appendix I of CITES.

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