Madagascar Wood-Rail in Flufftails

[Former user]

I noticed that Madagascar Wood-Rail is listed in the Flufftail family. That would be nice, since I have not seen a flufftail but have seen the wood-rail, but think it is incorrect and the wood-rail belongs in the rail family.

[Adam Winer]

I know it seems weird - but it's true! The eBird/Clements checklist made this change in 2015

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/clementschecklist/2015-updates-corrections/

... and IOC made this change in version 5.3. In either case, they were responding to results from the following paper:

García-R, J.C., G.C. Gibb, and S.A. Trewick. 2014. Deep global evolutionary radiation in birds: Diversification and trait evolution in the cosmopolitan bird family Rallidae. Mol. Phylog. Evol. 81: 96–108.

[Adam Winer]

... and you can read the paper at:

http://evolves.massey.ac.nz/PDFs/Garcia-R%20et%20al.%202014-MPE.pdf