In 1875, A. Newton also identified a reference to the bird in the 1726 account of the French traveller Julien Tafforet, which had recently been rediscovered. In 1879, more fossils, including skulls, were described by the zoologists Albert Günther and Edward Newton (brother of Alfred), who confirmed that the bird was a rail, and also noted that some specimens had beaks as curved as that of the red rail. In 1921, the American linguist Geoffroy Atkinson questioned the bird's existence, in an article that doubted the veracity of Leguat's memoir. The American ornithologist James Greenway suggested in 1967 that Leguat's description referred to wind-blown purple swamphens ("Porphyrio"), since the word grey is sometimes used synonymously with blue in old descriptions. This idea has not been accepted by other commentators. Today, it is widely accepted that Leguat's memoirs represent credible observations of local birds in life.