By the early 20th century, the lumping together of taxa had come to be preferred. The third edition of the American Ornithologists' Union (AOU) checklist in 1910, placed the screech owls back in Otus. Although this move was never unequivocally accepted, it was the dominant throughout most of the 20th century. In 1988, attempts to resolve this were made by re-establishing all those genera split some 140 years earlier at subgenus rank inside Otus. Still, the diversity and distinctness of the group failed to come together in a good evolutionary and phylogenetic picture, and until the availability of DNA sequence data,t this could not be resolved. In the mid- to late 1990s, preliminary studies of mtDNA cytochrome b across a wide range of owls found that even the treatment as subgenera was probably unsustainable and suggested that most of the genera proposed around 1850 should be accepted. Though some debate arose about the reliability of these findings at first, they have been confirmed by subsequent studies. In 2003, the AOU formally accepted the genus Megascops again.
