 Subfossil bones of a starling @-@ like bird were first discovered on Rodrigues by the police magistrate George Jenner In 1866 and 1871 , and by the reverend Henry Horrocks Slater in 1874 . They were found in caves on the Plaine Coral , a limestone plain in south @-@ west Rodrigues . These bones included the cranium , mandible , sternum , coracoid , humerus , metacarpus , ulna , femur , tibia , and metatarsus of several birds ; the bones were deposited in the British Museum and the Cambridge Museum . In 1879 , the bones became the basis of a scientific description of the bird by ornithologists Albert Günther and Edward Newton ( the brother of Alfred ) . They named the bird Necropsar rodericanus ; Nekros and psar are Greek for " dead " and " starling " , while rodericanus refers to the island of Rodrigues . This binomial was originally proposed by Slater in an 1874 manuscript he sent to Günther and Newton . Slater had prepared the manuscript for an 1879 publication , which was never released , but Günther and Newton quoted Slater 's unpublished notes in their own 1879 article , and credited him for the name . BirdLife International credits Slater rather than Günther and Newton for the name . Günther and Newton determined that the Rodrigues starling was closely related to the hoopoe starling , and they only kept it in a separate genus due to what they termed " present ornithological practice " . Due to the strongly built bill , they considered the new species likely the same as the bird mentioned in Tafforet 's account . 
