Cunha. The following year two study skins arrived in the Natural History Museum, London, followed soon after by another skin and a specimen in spirits. Physician Percy Lowe was then able to use the skins to describe the species. He did so, briefly, at a meeting of the British Ornithologists' Club, in 1923. Evolution and taxonomy Prior to its collection it had been assumed by Thomson that the species was close to the other "island hens" known in the Atlantic, possibly a gallinule, but on examination Lowe felt "compelled to refer it to a new genus". The generic name Atlantisia was named for the mythical island of Atlantis, destroyed by a volcano. The specific name rogersi honours the Rev. Rogers, who collected and sent the first specimens of the species to Lowe. In his 1928 paper on the species, Lowe thought the Inaccessible Island rail was the descendant of flightless ancestors which had reached Inaccessible Island via a land bridge or sunken continent such as Lemuria. Land bridges were commonly invoked to explain biogeographical distribution patterns before the development and acceptance of plate tectonics. By 1955 it was understood that the rail was the descendant of ancestors that had flown to Inaccessible Island. It was also presumed that like most other land birds of the Tristan Archipelago (except the Tristan moorhen Gallinula nesiotis and the Gough moorhen G. comeri), it had probably reached the island from ancestors in South America. The position of the Inaccessible Island rail in the larger rail family (Rallidae) has long been a source of uncertainty. Lowe thought that its closest relatives may have been black crake of Africa, or perhaps an early offshoot of the genus Porphyrio (swamphens), a conclusion based mostly on similarities of plumage. He did concede that it was difficult to assign the rail to any relatives. American paleontologist Storrs Olson suggested in 1973 that it was related to the "Rallus assemblage", which included the genera Rallus and Hypotaenidia (now lumped with Gallirallus), based on the structure of the skeleton. In particular he suggested it was part of a pro-Rallus group that included the Indian Ocean genus Dryolimnas, and the Australasian Lewinia. Olson suggested the pro-Rallus rails have a relict distribution and would have been present in Africa and South America, where the ancestors of the Inaccessible Island rail came from. The most recent comparative morphological study to include the genus, in