Every Bird, In A Tree A team of evolutionary ornithologists (which is a field I really just made up, but hey, maybe it exists?) has drawn the first complete family tree for all known modern bird species. Not only is it a beautiful sight to gaze upon, but it demonstrates a new, important, and controversial idea about biodiversity.  It was thought that any given species would expand and diversify quickly into subspecies (like the many different kinds of honeybees), soon maxing out its environment and filling all the ecological “niches”. Then, competition over limited resources would thin that down to the few most adaptable species. This tree says the opposite, that birds are continuing to diversify even today, and fast. The center of this tree, anchoring branches built using fossil and DNA sequence data, reaches back nearly 50 million years, to the earliest days of birds branching off of dinosaurs. Despite the amazing story of avian evolution that this tree tells, it probably won’t help change Werner Herzog’s mind about chickens. (via Yale News; The full paper, in Nature, can be found here if you have access)
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Every Bird, In A Tree

A team of evolutionary ornithologists (which is a field I really just made up, but hey, maybe it exists?) has drawn the first complete family tree for all known modern bird species. Not only is it a beautiful sight to gaze upon, but it demonstrates a new, important, and controversial idea about biodiversity. 

It was thought that any given species would expand and diversify quickly into subspecies (like the many different kinds of honeybees), soon maxing out its environment and filling all the ecological “niches”. Then, competition over limited resources would thin that down to the few most adaptable species. This tree says the opposite, that birds are continuing to diversify even today, and fast.

The center of this tree, anchoring branches built using fossil and DNA sequence data, reaches back nearly 50 million years, to the earliest days of birds branching off of dinosaurs.

Despite the amazing story of avian evolution that this tree tells, it probably won’t help change Werner Herzog’s mind about chickens.

(via Yale News; The full paper, in Nature, can be found here if you have access)

Source: news.yale.edu

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  1. myultimatereblogblog reblogged this from citronrobotlord
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  6. wastetoday reblogged this from scientificillustration and added:
    This is so cool.
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  16. nemertea reblogged this from scientificillustration and added:
    I hate to nitpick, but we KNOW from the fossil record that the bird root is Mesozoic — far older than a mere 50 million...
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