The buttonquails or hemipodes are a small family of birds which resemble, but are unrelated to, the true quails.
Buttonquail were traditionally placed in Gruiformes or Phasianidae (the crane and pheasant orders), but the Sibley-Ahlquist taxonomy elevated them to ordinal status as the Turniciformes.
This is an Old World group, which inhabits warm grasslands.
These are small drab running birds, which avoid flying. The female is the brighter of the sexes, and initiates courtship. The male incubates the eggs and tends the young.
All but one of the 15 species are in the genus Turnix.
The buttonquails or hemipodes are a small family of birds which resemble, but are unrelated to, the true quails.
Buttonquail were traditionally placed in Gruiformes or Phasianidae (the crane and pheasant orders).
The Sibley-Ahlquist taxonomy elevated them to ordinal status as the Turniciformes and basal to other Neoaves either because their accelerated rate of molecular evolution exceeded the limits of sensitivity of DNA-DNA hybridization or because the authors did not perform the appropriate pairwise comparisons or both.
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