the English name rufous-backed sparrow, but as this name might cause confusion with other species, Ticehurst suggested the name Sind jungle-sparrow, which became the accepted name for the species. This name refers to Sindh, a province now in Pakistan which makes up a large part of the Sind sparrow's range, and the jungle habitat of the bird (in the word's original sense of tangled dry thicket). This name is shortened to jungle sparrow or Sind sparrow, of which the first was used in the IOC World Bird List, until Sind sparrow was adopted in 2009. The Sind sparrow is a member of the genus Passer, which contains the house sparrow and around twenty other species. In a 1936 review of the house sparrow's relatives, German ornithologist Wilhelm Meise suggested that the Sind sparrow evolved from an isolated population of house sparrows, noting that the Indus valley is a centre of small bird types. British ornithologist J. Denis Summers-Smith considered the Sind sparrow to be part of the "Palaearctic black-bibbed sparrow" group including the house sparrow, though not one with a particularly close relationship with the house sparrow. Summer-Smith suggested that these species separated 25,000 to 15,000 years ago, during the last glacial period, when sparrows would have been isolated in ice-free refugia, such as the Indus River Delta, where he thought the Sind sparrow evolved. However, studies of mitochondrial DNA and nuclear DNA genes indicate an earlier origin of Passer species, with speciation occurring as early as the late Miocene and early Pliocene, about 5 million years ago. The chestnut sparrow, russet sparrow and saxaul sparrow, which were also considered to be members of the "Palaearctic black-bibbed sparrow" group, are not phylogenetically closely related with the house sparrow. But there is more or less conflict between the two studies (and between different analyses), some clades are not highly supported, and the Sind sparrow was not included, so the evolutionary history of Sind sparrow and its relationship to other sparrow species remain unclear. Hume and Ticehurst observed a resemblance, and a possible relation, between the Sind sparrow and the Dead Sea sparrow of the Middle East and Balochistan. William Robert Ogilvie-Grant and Henry Ogg Forbes saw a resemblance to the Abd al-Kuri sparrow, endemic to the island of Abd al-Kuri, in their 1899 description of that species, noted upon by Guy M. Kirwan in a 2008 study. Distribution and habitat The