Grus Cranes

Grus is a genus of large birds in the crane family.

The genus Grus erected by the French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson in 1760. The name Grus is the Latin word for "crane". The German ornithologist Peter Simon Pallas was sometimes credited with erecting the genus in 1766 but the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature ruled in 1956 that Brisson should have priority.

The genus formerly included additional species. A molecular phylogenetic study published in 2010 found that the genus Grus, as then defined, was polyphyletic. In the resulting rearrangement to create monophyletic genera, the sandhill crane, the white-naped crane, the sarus crane and the brolga were moved to the resurrected genus Antigone that had been erected by the German naturalist Ludwig Reichenbach in 1853. The Siberian crane was moved to the resurrected monotypic genus Leucogeranus.