 Another unidentified parrot specimen , this one brown and housed in Cabinet du Roi , was described by French naturalist Comte de Buffon in 1779 under his entry for the Mascarene parrot , in which he pointed out similarities and differences between the two . The English palaeontologist Julian Hume has suggested the possibility that this might have been a lesser vasa parrot , if not a discoloured old Mascarene grey parakeet ( Psittacula bensoni ) . The specimen is now lost . English zoologist and author George Robert Gray assigned some eclectus parrot ( Eclectus roratus ) subspecies from the Moluccas to Mascarinus in his book A List of the Genera of Birds from the 1840s , but this idea was soon dismissed by other writers . 
