Naming
This species was formerly considered one of the 15 recognised subspecies of what was then known as the variable dwarf kingfisher. A molecular phylogenetic study published in 2013 found that most of the insular subspecies had substantially diverged from one another. The variable dwarf kingfisher was therefore split and 12 of the subspecies, including the Papuan dwarf kingfisher, were promoted to species status. At the same time the name of the variable dwarf kingfisher was changed to the Moluccan dwarf kingfisher.References:
Some text fragments are auto parsed from Wikipedia.
