Museum scientists first encountered the Sangha Forest Robin on a 1996 expedition to the Central African Republic. It was one of seventy bird species collected for a diorama--a life-size slice of the Dzanga-Sangha rain forest--created for the new Hall of Biodiversity.

Information Was Scanty--and Inaccurate
The forest robin was first described in 1855, and was followed by descriptions of a second and third species by 1903. But they were reclassified into a single species in the decades that followed, "so that the biggest reference books said there was one species of forest robins that was distributed right across Africa without any geographical variation whatsoever," explains Pamela Beresford, a graduate student at the City University of New York who works with the department of ornithology at the museum. "That's what was known about forest robins when we went there."