The red rail (Aphanapteryx bonasia) is an extinct species of rail that was endemic to the Mascarene island of Mauritius, east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. It had a close relative on Rodrigues island, the likewise extinct Rodrigues rail (Erythromachus leguati), with which it is sometimes considered congeneric, but their relationship with other rails is unclear. Rails often evolve flightlessness when adapting to isolated islands, free of mammalian predators, and that was also the case for this species. The red rail was a little larger than a chicken and had reddish, hairlike plumage, with dark legs and a long, curved beak. The wings were small, and its legs were slender for a bird of its size. It was similar to the Rodrigues rail, but was larger, and had proportionally shorter wings. It has been compared to a kiwi or a limpkin in appearance and behaviour. This bird is believed to have fed on invertebrates, and snail shells have been found with damage matching an attack by its beak. Human hunters took advantage of an attraction red rails had to red objects by using coloured cloth to lure the birds so that they could be beaten with sticks. Until subfossil remains were discovered in the 1860s, scientists only knew the red rail from 17th century descriptions and illustrations. These were thought to represent several different species, which resulted in a large number of invalid junior synonyms. It has been suggested that all late 17th-century accounts of the dodo actually referred to the red rail, after the former had become extinct. The last mention of a red rail sighting is from 1693, and it is thought to have gone extinct around 1700, due to predation by humans and introduced species.
Taxonomy The red rail was first mentioned as "Indian river woodcocks" by the Dutch ships' pilot Heyndrick Dircksz Jolinck in 1598. By the 19th century, the bird was known only from a few contemporary descriptions referring to red "hens" and names otherwise used for grouse or partridges in Europe, as well as the sketches of the Dutch merchant Pieter van den Broecke and the English traveller Sir Thomas Herbert from 1646 and 1634. While they differed in some details, they were thought to depict a single species by the English naturalist Hugh Edwin Strickland in 1848. The same year, the Belgian scientist Edmond de Sélys Longchamps coined the scientific name Apterornis bonasia based on the old accounts mentioned by Strickland. He also included two other Mascarene birds, at the time only known from contemporary accounts, in the genus Apterornis: the Réunion ibis (now Threskiornis solitarius); and the Réunion swamphen (now Porphyrio caerulescens). He thought them related to the dodo and Rodrigues solitaire, due to their shared rudimentary wings, tail, and the disposition of their digits. The name Apterornis had already been used for a different extinct bird genus from New Zealand (originally spelled Aptornis, the adzebills) by the British biologist Richard Owen earlier in 1848. The meaning of bonasia is unclear. Some early accounts refer to red rails by the vernacular names for the hazel grouse, Tetrastes bonasia, so the name evidently originates there. The name itself perhaps refers to bonasus, meaning "bull" in Latin, or bonum and assum, meaning "good roast". The allusion to bulls may be due the bird being said to have had a similar attraction to the waving of red cloth. It has also been suggested to be a Latin form of the French word bonasse, meaning simple-minded or good-natured.
The German ornithologist Hermann Schlegel thought van den Broecke's sketch depicted a smaller dodo species from Mauritius, and that the Herbert sketch showed a dodo from Rodrigues, and named them Didus broecki and Didus herberti in 1854. In 1968, the Austrian naturalist Georg Ritter von Frauenfeld brought attention to paintings by the Flemish artist Jacob Hoefnagel depicting animals in the royal menagerie of Emperor Rudolph II in Prague, including a dodo and a bird he named Aphanapteryx imperialis. Aphanapteryx means "invisible-wing", from Greek aphanēs, unseen, and pteryx, wing. He compared it with the birds earlier named form old accounts, and found its beak similar to that of a kiwi or ibis.
In 1865, subfossil foot bones and a lower jaw were found along with remains of other Mauritian animals in the Mare aux Songes swamp, and were sent by the British ornithologists Edward Newton to the French zoologist Alphonse Milne-Edwards, who identified them as belonging to a rail in 1868. Milne-Edwards correlated the bones with the bird in the Hoefnagel painting and the old accounts, and combined the genus name Aphanapteryx with the older specific name broecki. Due to nomenclatural priority, the genus name was later combined with the oldest species name bonasia. In the 1860s, the travel journal of the Dutch East India Company ship Gelderland (1601–1603) was rediscovered, which contains good sketches of several now-extinct Mauritian birds attributed to the Dutch artist Joris Laerle, including an unlabelled red rail. More fossils were later found by the French naturalist Theodore Sauzier, who had been commissioned to explore the "historical souvenirs" of Mauritius in 1889, and these were described by Newton and the German ornithologist Hans F. Gadow in 1893. In 1899, an almost complete specimen was found by the French barber Louis Etienne Thirioux, who also found important dodo remains, in a cave in the Vallée des Prêtres; this is the most completely known red rail specimen, and is catalogued as MI 923 in the Mauritius Institute. The second most complete individual (specimen CMNZ AV6284) also mainly consists of bones from the Thirioux collection. More material has since been found in various settings. The yellowish colouration mentioned by English traveller Peter Mundy in 1638 instead of the red of other accounts was used by the Japanese ornithologist Masauji Hachisuka in 1937 as an argument for this referring to a distinct genus and species, Kuina mundyi (the generic name means "water-rail" in Japanese), but the American ornithologist Storrs L. Olson suggested in 1977 that it was possibly due to the observed bird being a juvenile red rail.
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