Carol K.L. Yeung Cheng-Te Yao Xiu-Hua Tian Shou-Hsien Li R. Terry Chesser 2010 Spoonbills (genus <i>Platalea</i>) are a small group of wading birds, generally considered to constitute the subfamily Plataleinae (Aves: Threskiornithidae). We reconstructed phylogenetic relationships among the six species of spoonbills using variation in sequences of the mitochondrial genes <i>ND2</i> and cytochrome <i>b</i> (total 1796 bp). Topologies of phylogenetic trees reconstructed using maximum likelihood, maximum parsimony, and Bayesian analyses were virtually identical and supported monophyly of the spoonbills. Most relationships within <i>Platalea</i> received strong support: <i>P. minor</i> and <i>P. regia</i> were closely related sister species, <i>P. leucorodia</i> was sister to the <i>minor-regia</i> clade, and <i>P. alba</i> was sister to the <i>minor-regia-leucorodia</i> clade. Relationships of <i>P. flavipes</i> and <i>P. ajaja</i> were less well resolved: these species either formed a clade that was sister to the four-species clade, or were successive sisters to this clade. This phylogeny is consistent with ideas of relatedness derived from spoonbill morphology. Our limited sampling of the Threskiornithinae (ibises), the putative sister group to the spoonbills, indicated that this group is paraphyletic, in agreement with previous molecular data; this suggests that separation of the Threskiornithidae into subfamilies Plataleinae and Threskiornithinae may not be warranted. application/pdf en Magnolia Press Molecular phylogeny of the spoonbills (Aves: Threskiornithidae) based on mitochondrial DNA article