The Taylor White Collection of paintings from the 1700s, held at the McGill University Library, includes 661 paintings that illustrate 832 birds from around the world. With illustrations of 443 species in 30 avian orders, this collection represents a substantial proportion of the bird species known at the time and is one of the most comprehensive and accurate collections of coloured bird illustrations made during the eighteenth century. Most of the paintings were made by Charles Collins and Peter Paillou from live birds or dead specimens in the cabinets and aviaries of White and his contemporaries. We compared a large sample of the paintings with the same birds depicted in modern bird guides to assess quantitatively the accuracy of the illustrations with respect to the colours and patterns of plumages and soft parts. We found that fewer than 3% of the paintings contained errors, and usually only in one of the 28 body regions that we assessed. Given this high level of accuracy, we identified a small red macaw from the West Indies as likely representing a previously unknown but now extinct subspecies of the Scarlet Macaw, and two other paintings of species that could not be convincingly matched to any known species.

麦吉尔大学图书馆收藏的 1700 年代泰勒怀特画作收藏包括 661 幅画作，描绘了来自世界各地的 832 只鸟类。该系列包含 30 个鸟类目中的 443 个物种的插图，代表了当时已知鸟类的很大一部分，是 18 世纪制作的最全面、最准确的彩色鸟类插图集之一。大多数画作是查尔斯柯林斯和彼得帕尤从怀特及其同时代人的橱柜和鸟舍中的活鸟或死鸟标本制作的。我们将大量绘画样本与现代鸟类指南中描绘的相同鸟类进行了比较，以定量评估插图在羽毛和柔软部分的颜色和图案方面的准确性。我们发现只有不到 3% 的绘画包含错误，而且通常只在我们评估的 28 个身体部位之一中。鉴于这种高度的准确性，我们确定了一只来自西印度群岛的小型红色金刚鹦鹉，它可能代表了一种以前未知但现已灭绝的猩红色金刚鹦鹉亚种，以及另外两幅无法与任何已知物种相匹配的物种画作。