The Acridotheres mynas are generally dark or dull birds with and fluted calls like most starlings; the sexes are similar. They walk and hop, and may share adaptations along with the Sturnus starlings that have modifications to the skull and its muscles for open bill probing or prying.[2] They resemble the hill mynas (Gracula) with which they often co-occur, in having large white or buff wing patches which are obvious in flight and in some also naked areas on the head, but differ in that only the head plumage is glossy, and the underparts tend to be paler. The naked head patches are different in arrangement. Acridotheres mynas are also much more terrestrial than Gracula.
Several species have frontal crests which become covered with pollen when the birds take nectar from flowers, and may play a role in pollination.
The genus Acridotheres was introduced by the French ornithologist Louis Pierre Vieillot in 1816.[3] The type species was subsequently designated as the common myna.[4] The name Acridotheres combines the Ancient Greek words akridos "locust" and -thēras "-hunter".[5]
Despite being both called "mynas", the Acridotheres mynas are closer related to a group of mainly terrestrial starlings from Eurasia, such as the common starling, and also African ones like the Lamprotornis glossy-starlings. Among these, they are among the larger and duller species; they seem to be one of the major groups to evolve most recently. Apparently, they all arose from ancestors which arrived from Central Asia and adapted to more humid conditions in the Tropics. They presumably were isolated in about their current range when the evolutionary radiation to which they belonged - including the wattled starling and the Sturnia species - was fragmented by desertification at the start of the Early Pliocene, as Earth turned towards the last ice age 5 million years ago.
Two other species, the red-billed starling (Spodiopsar sericeus) and the white-cheeked starling (Spodiopsar cineraceus), are probably basal in the group and might even be closer to Sturnia. The relationships of the white-faced starling (Sturornis albofrontatus) are more unclear, but it is generally not held to be close to the present genus.
^Jobling, J.A. (2018). del Hoyo, J.; Elliott, A.; Sargatal, J.; Christie, D.A.; de Juana, E. (eds.). "Key to Scientific Names in Ornithology". Handbook of the Birds of the World Alive. Lynx Edicions. Retrieved 11 May 2018.
Feare, Chris & Craig, Adrian (1999): Starlings and Mynas. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-7136-3961-X
Grimmett, Richard; Inskipp, Carol, Inskipp, Tim & Byers, Clive (1999): Birds of India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J.. ISBN0-691-04910-6
Zuccon, Dario; Cibois, Anne; Pasquet, Eric & Ericson, Per G.P. (2006): Nuclear and mitochondrial sequence data reveal the major lineages of starlings, mynas and related taxa. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution41(2): 333–344. doi:10.1016/j.ympev.2006.05.007 (HTML abstract)
