See text Nanocorax (in part) Microcarbo is a genus of fish-eating birds, known as cormorants, of the family Phalacrocoracidae.

Microcarbo has been recognized as a valid genus by the IOC's World Bird List[1] on the basis of work by Siegel-Causey (1988), Kennedy et al. (2000), and Christidis and Boles (2008).

It is also the most basal, having diverged from the rest of the family between 12.8 to 15.4 million years ago.

[2] The genus Microcarbo was introduced in 1856 by the French naturalist Charles Lucien Bonaparte with the pygmy cormorant as the type species.

[3][4] The name combines the Ancient Greek mikros meaning "small" with the genus name Carbo that was introduced by Bernard Germain de Lacépède in 1789.