Largest wild pigeon

The world's largest species of wild pigeon is the Victoria crowned pigeon (Goura victoria), named after the British Queen Victoria, and native to the New Guinea mainland's northern lowland and swamps forests (in both Papua New Guinea and Indonesian New Guinea) as well as three small off-lying islands. Predominantly dark blue-grey in colour with a diagnostically white-tipped crest, it can exceed a total length of 80 cm (2 ft 7.5 in) and a weight of 3.5 kg (7 lb 11 oz). The other three species of crowned pigeon housed within the genus Goura are very slightly smaller.

"Goura" is a New Guinea aboriginal name for the crowned pigeons.

The species was first brought to the attention of Western science by British zoologist Louis Fraser who described the crowned pigeon at a meeting of the Zoological Society of London on 27 August 1844 (though he originally used Lophyrus as the genus name).

The other three species of crowned pigeon are the common or western crowned pigeon (G. cristata), Scheepmaker's crowned pigeon (G. scheepmakeri), and Sclater's crowned pigeon (G. sclateri). Last conclusively sighted and collected in 1904, there was once also what some ornithologists consider to have been a miniature relative. This was the Choiseul crowned (aka crested) pigeon (Microgoura meeki), indigenous to the island of Choiseul (and possibly also a few others) in the Solomon Islands group, lying to the south-east of New Guinea. The only member of its genus, it was claimed by the Choiseul natives to have been exterminated by introduced cats, as it had no defence against carnivorous mammals, which were hitherto unknown on the island. An unconfirmed sighting during the 1940s was the last report of this seemingly lost species.