The Argus is a type of bird

Bird

Birds are feathered, winged, bipedal, endothermic , egg-laying, vertebrate animals. Around 10,000 living species and 188 families makes them the most speciose class of tetrapod vertebrates. They inhabit ecosystems across the globe, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Extant birds range in size from...

 in the family Phasianidae

Phasianidae

The Phasianidae is a family of birds which consists of the pheasants and partridges, including the junglefowl , Old World Quail, francolins, monals and peafowl. The family is a large one, and is occasionally broken up into two subfamilies, the Phasianinae, and the Perdicinae...

 and is closely related to pheasant

Pheasant

Pheasants refer to some members of the Phasianinae subfamily of Phasianidae in the order Galliformes.Pheasants are characterised by strong sexual dimorphism, males being highly ornate with bright colours and adornments such as wattles and long tails. Males are usually larger than females and have...

s and peafowl

Peafowl

Peafowl are two Asiatic species of flying birds in the genus Pavo of the pheasant family, Phasianidae, best known for the male's extravagant eye-spotted tail, which it displays as part of courtship. The male is called a peacock, the female a peahen, and the offspring peachicks. The adult female...

. It has hundreds or thousands of tiny white spots on its plumage pattern, and thus its naming might have been in reference to the mythical hundred-eyed giant argus

ARGUS

ARGUS, all capitalized, may refer to:* ARGUS , a particle physics experiment that ran at DESY* ARGUS distribution, a function used in particle physics named after the above experiment...

 or Argus Panoptes

Argus Panoptes

In Greek mythology, Argus Panoptes or Argos, guardian of the heifer-nymph Io and son of Arestor, was a primordial giant whose epithet "Panoptes", "all-seeing", led to his being described with multiple, often one hundred, eyes. The epithet Panoptes was applied to the Titan of the Sun, Helios, and...

.

There are two genera of birds that are considered Arguses: Rheinardia and Argusianus

Argusianus

The genus Argusianus G.R. Gray, 1849 consists of two species of spectacularly plumaged pheasant with greatly elongated secondaries and central tail feathers....

. Within these genera there are two recognized species each with two subspecies. Argusianus

Argusianus

The genus Argusianus G.R. Gray, 1849 consists of two species of spectacularly plumaged pheasant with greatly elongated secondaries and central tail feathers....

 also has a mysterious second species that is sometime thought to have gone extinct

Extinction

In biology and ecology, extinction is the end of an organism or of a group of organisms , normally a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and recover may have been lost before this point...

, but most likely is based on a simple aberration.

In popular culture, the Argus was the animal form inspiration for the multicolored NBC

NBC

The National Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network and former radio network headquartered in the GE Building in New York City's Rockefeller Center with additional major offices near Los Angeles and in Chicago...

 mascot/branding element hand-sketched in 1956 by John J. Graham. To this day, inside NBC the bird is known to be an Argus, not a peacock which the general public believes to be the bird type. Historically NBC has made little effort outside of its company walls to correct the general public on the Argus/peacock matter.

• Crested Argus (genus Rheinardia)
  • Crested Argus Pheasant (R. ocellata)

• Great Argus (genus Argusianus
  Argusianus
  The genus Argusianus G.R. Gray, 1849 consists of two species of spectacularly plumaged pheasant with greatly elongated secondaries and central tail feathers....
  
  )
  • Great Argus Pheasant (A. argus)