Maleo

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A ground-dwelling bird of Sulawesi in Indonesia that lays its eggs in warm volcanic sand or soil rather than incubating them
2. A chicken-sized megapode native to the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, known for buried nests heated by geothermal warmth
3. A dark, crested bird found only on Sulawesi that relies on sun and volcanic heat to hatch its eggs in mounds

Etymology: The maleo is a bird of Sulawesi, and its English name comes from the languages spoken on that island. Many of the local peoples of the Celebes region used a common word for these birds, and the Dutch zoologist Coenraad Jacob Temminck adopted that native term as the bird's common name in 1826. The name thus reached European science from the island itself rather than from Latin or Greek. The bird's scientific identity followed a few decades later. In 1846 the German naturalist Salomon Müller gave the maleo its species epithet, the second half of its formal Latin name, so the local word and the European classification entered the record separately.