the reverse is apparently not true, since the songs of the common firecrest are simpler in construction than those of its relatives. The songs of mainland goldcrests vary only slightly across their range and consist of a single song type, but much more divergence has occurred in the isolated Macaronesian populations. Not only are there variations between islands and within an island, but individual males on the Azores can have up to three song types. The dialects on the Azores fall into two main groups, neither of which elicited a response from male European goldcrests in playback experiments. There are also two main dialect groups on the Canary islands, a widespread group similar to the European version, and another that is restricted to the mountains of Tenerife. The song variations have been used to investigate the colonisation pattern of the Macaronesian islands by goldcrests, and identified a previously unknown subspecies. Taxonomy The kinglets are a small group of birds sometimes included in the Old World warblers, but frequently given family status, especially as recent research shows that despite superficial similarities, they are phylogenetically remote from the warblers. The names of the family Regulidae, and the genus Regulus, are derived from the Latin , a diminutive of , a king. The goldcrest was first described by Carl Linnaeus in his in 1758 as Motacilla regulus (characterised as ). It was moved to the warbler genus Sylvia by English naturalist John Latham in 1790, and to its current genus by French zoologist Georges Cuvier in 1800. The relationships of the flamecrest or Taiwan firecrest (Regulus goodfellowi) of Taiwan have also been a source of much debate. It is sometimes viewed as a race of firecrest, but its territorial song resembles those of the Himalayan races of goldcrest, and genetic data show that it is the closest relative of that species, and, despite its alternative name, only distantly related to the firecrest. The flamecrest diverged from the goldcrest 3.0–3.1 mya (million years ago). Subspecies Continental Eurasia Several subspecies of the goldcrest have been described. In continental Eurasia, there are nine generally accepted and very similar subspecies, differing only in details such as plumage shade. At the genetic level, the two Central Asian forms, R. r. sikkimensis and R. r. himalayensis, are very close to each other, and have differentiated only in the recent past, but they diverged from the western subspecies around 2.8