The Mangaia Swiftlet is an extinct species of bird

Bird

Birds are feathered, winged, bipedal, endothermic , egg-laying, vertebrate animals. Around 10,000 living species and 188 families makes them the most speciose class of tetrapod vertebrates. They inhabit ecosystems across the globe, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Extant birds range in size from...

 in the swift

Swift

The swifts are a family, Apodidae, of highly aerial birds. They are superficially similar to swallows, but are actually not closely related to passerine species at all; swifts are in the separate order Apodiformes, which they share with hummingbirds...

 family. It became extinct during prehistoric times. It was endemic to Mangaia

Mangaia

Mangaia is the most southerly of the Cook Islands and the second largest, after Rarotonga.-Geography:...

, Cook Islands

Cook Islands

The Cook Islands is a self-governing parliamentary democracy in the South Pacific Ocean in free association with New Zealand...

. It was closely allied with the extant Atiu Swiftlet

Atiu Swiftlet

The Atiu Swiftlet is a species of bird in the swift family and endemic to Atiu in the Cook Islands.Its natural habitats are the islands fernlands and mixed horticultural areas over which it feeds and in makatea limestone caves within which it nests.-External links:*...

 (Aerodramus sawtelli) of Atiu

Atiu

Atiu, also known as Enuamanu , is an island lying at 187 km to the northeast of Rarotonga, in the Southern Islands group of the Cook Islands Archipelago.-Geography:...

, Mangaia's neighbouring island, though it was probably slightly larger.

It was described from six fossil

Fossil

Fossils are the preserved remains or traces of animals , plants, and other organisms from the remote past...

 bones recovered from a Holocene

Holocene

The Holocene is a geological epoch which began at the end of the Pleistocene and continues to the present. The Holocene is part of the Quaternary period. Its name comes from the Greek words and , meaning "entirely recent"...

 rock shelter

Rock shelter

A rock shelter is a shallow cave-like opening at the base of a bluff or cliff....

 deposit on Mangaia. The coracoid and carpometacarpus

Carpometacarpus

The carpometacarpus is the fusion of the carpal and metacarpal bone, essentially a single fused bone between the wrist and the knuckles. It is a smallish bone in most birds, generally flattened and with a large hole in the middle. In flightless birds, however, its shape may be slightly different,...

of the new species are larger and very different qualitatively from those of the Atiu species. This is the first species of Aerodramus to be described from fossils.