Masked Finfoot

The masked finfoot or Asian finfoot (Heliopais personatus) is a highly endangered aquatic bird that was formerly distributed throughout the fresh and brackish wetlands of the eastern Indian subcontinent, Indochina, Malaysia and Indonesia. Like the rest of the family, the African finfoot and the sungrebe, the relationship to other birds is poorly understood. == Evolution == Unusually, phylogenetic evidence indicates that the masked finfoot is closely related to the Neotropical sungrebe, despite the African finfoot being geographically closer to both of them than either the sungrebe or masked finfoot are to each other. This suggests that the common ancestor of Heliopais and Heliornis diverged in the Old World during the mid-Tertiary, with the ancestral Heliornis colonizing the Americas via Beringia. Finfoots appear to have poor dispersal capabilities over marine habitats, which may explain why such a complex process was needed to colonize the Americas as opposed to overwater dispersal from Africa. === Fossil record === The genus Heliopais appears to have had a much wider distribution in the past, as an isolated humerus assigned to Heliopais aff. personata is known from the Late Miocene (Messinian)-aged Adu Asa Formation of Chad. This suggests that during the Miocene, Heliopais ranged as far…