Short answers, pulled from the story.
Tyto is a genus of owls in the family Tytonidae, known by common names including barn owl, grass owl, sooty owl, and masked owl. It is the most widely distributed genus of owls in the world, found on every continent except Antarctica and absent only from polar regions, deserts, parts of Asia north of the Himalayas, and some Pacific and Indonesian islands. The genus currently comprises 17 living species.
Seventeen living species are currently recognised in the Tyto genus. Three are widespread continental species: the western barn owl (Tyto alba), the eastern barn owl (Tyto javanica), and the American barn owl (Tyto furcata). The remaining species are largely island-restricted, ranging from Australia and Indonesia to Madagascar, Hispaniola, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The genus Tyto was introduced in 1828 by the Swedish naturalist Gustaf Johan Billberg, with Tyto alba as the type species. The name comes from the Ancient Greek word tutO, meaning owl, which is itself onomatopoeic.
Barn owls hunt primarily by sound rather than sight, using their large heart-shaped facial disc to channel sound toward very acute ears. Nearly all of their diet consists of small mammals, which they catch on the ground. They are nocturnal across most of their range, though populations in Great Britain and on some Pacific Islands also hunt by day.
The 2018 study by Vera Uva and collaborators compared DNA sequences at three mitochondrial and one nuclear locus, providing support for splitting the historically unified barn owl into four separate species. The American Ornithological Society and the Cornell University Clements Checklist adopted this split in 2024, though BirdLife International has not yet accepted it.
Several extinct Tyto species are known from fossils, including Tyto gigantea and Tyto robusta from the Gargano Peninsula in Italy, and Tyto balearica from the west-central Mediterranean. Late prehistoric extinctions concentrated in the Caribbean include the Puerto Rican barn owl, which may have survived until 1912, and the Bahaman barn owl, which may have persisted into the 16th century.