Scientists have created the largest and most detailed bird family tree ever, showing how various species are related to each other and how they evolved over the past 93 million years. The study, published in Nature, looked at the genomes of 363 bird species, representing 92% of all bird families. “Our goal is to reconstruct the entire evolutionary history of all birds,” said study co-author Siavash Mirarab, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, San Diego. To build this family tree, the team used genomic data from more than 60,000 genomic regions, cutting-edge computational methods developed by engineers at UC San Diego, and a supercomputer. Scientist have created the most complete bird tree of life to date. 10,135 bird species are shown here on a draft phylogeny. Figure from Stiller et al 2024. Modern bird groups, it turns out, appeared within a small window of 5 million years after the mass extinction of dinosaurs 66 million years ago. The researchers found that these early birds experienced rapid increases in population size, evolution speed and brain size during this time. “After an asteroid hit the Earth, birds made the most of the opportunities that opened up after these extinctions to become one of the most diverse and successful groups of animals,” study co-author Jacqueline Nguyen, a paleontologist at Flinders University in Australia, told Mongabay. The scientists also found it was more important to study many genes from each bird species than to study fewer genes from…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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