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The tufted jay, also known as the painted jay or Dickey's jay, was first described by Robert Thomas Moore in 1935 based on specimens collected near Santa Lucía, Sinaloa, in Mexico. Due to its very limited range, the species was not discovered during previous collection expeditions, despite them passing within 56 km of its habitat. Moore gave it the species name Cyanocorax dickeyi, with the specific name being named after Donald Ryder Dickey. The tufted jay has no recognized subspecies.



The tufted jay's relation to other members of the Cyanocorax genus has been a subject of interest since its initial description. In 1935, Moore noted some difficulties with its placement in Cyanocorax, namely that its geographically closest relative in that genus was found in Costa Rica over 2000 km away, but that it most closely resembled the white-tailed jay (Cyanocorax mysticalis) found in Ecuador over 4800 km away. This implied that the tufted jay and white-tailed jay descended from a common ancestor that once lived throughout Central and South America, and that the visual similarities were the result of convergent evolution. This hypotheses has been commonly held by others who studied the tufted jay

Because of the visual similarities between the tufted jay and the white-tailed jay, some researchers thought that the two must be more closely related than their ranges would imply. In 1969, John William Hardy proposed that the tufted jay had descended from a flock that had accidentally been brought to Mexico by a storm, noting that a similar phenomenon happened to a group of San Blas jays in 1937. In 1979, Paul Haemig proposed that the white-tailed jay had been brought to Mexico by trade between pre-Columbian societies, and that the tufted jay was derived from that population. A 1989 study of the morphological characteristics of the two species seemed to support these hypotheses by concluding that the two were sister species. The most recent discussion of the relation between these two jays was in 2010, when a mtDNA study was done on members of the Cyanocorax genus. It demonstrated that the tufted jay and white-tailed jay were not sister species, and that tufted jay was more closely related to other South American jays. This study determined that the most likely explanation for the geographical gap between the tufted jay and its South American relatives was due to a widely distributed ancestor that had gone extinct.