of his natural-history collection. The specimen's original label referred specifically to Levaillant's plate of the "perruche a double collier", illustrated by the French artist Jacques Barraband, which was meant to depict the parakeet of Réunion. Jones cautioned that the collection data of such early specimens may not always be reliable, and that the skin could possibly have come from Mauritius, instead. Whether the Edinburgh skin was the basis of Martinet's type illustration is unknown. Jones did not find the skin particularly different from those of living echo parakeets (or the old French descriptions), based on examination of photographs. He agreed with previous authors that the parakeets of Mauritius and Réunion belonged to the same species (P. eques, the oldest name), but that they should be kept separate at the subspecific level (as P. e. eques and P. e. echo), due to lack of further information about the extinct bird. The living parakeet of Mauritius has been referred to by the English common name "echo parakeet" since the 1970s, based on the scientific name, and has also been called the Mauritius parakeet. The local Mauritian name is cateau vert, kato, or katover (derived from the French). The Réunion population has been referred to as the Réunion parakeet and the Réunion ring-necked parakeet, but has also been subsumed under the common name of the echo parakeet. Evolution In 2004, British geneticist Jim J. Groombridge and colleagues examined the DNA of Psittacula parakeets to determine their evolutionary relationships, and found that the echo parakeet had diverged from the boreal subspecies of rose-ringed parakeet (P. k. borealis) rather than the African subspecies (P. k. krameri). They found that the echo parakeet diverged relatively recently compared to other Psittacula species, between 0.7 and 2.0 million years ago, which appears to coincide with volcanic inactivity on Mauritius between 0.6 and 2.1 million years ago. The ancestors of the echo parakeet may, therefore, have migrated southwards from India across the Indian Ocean, and arrived at the time the island was formed. The authors cautioned that their interpretations were limited by the absence of DNA from the extinct Seychelles parakeet (P. wardi) and Newton's parakeet (P. exsul) from other Indian Ocean islands. In 2007, based on morphological evidence, British palaeontologist Julian P. Hume found the echo parakeet to be more closely related to the Alexandrine parakeet than to the rose-ringed parakeet. He noted that the skeletal anatomy of