The Avian Tree of Life

All school-children know that 66 million years ago, a massive extinction killed most of the life on Earth, including all of the dinosaurs. Slightly better informed school-children know that some dinosaurs survived - the birds. And after the dust settled on that event, the surviving birds diversified enormously, evolving to exploit a huge range of ecological niches left vacant. But the speed with which the birds diversified after the cataclysm means that understanding the avian family tree from fossils has been difficult - too much was happening at the same time. Now, a new avian family tree has been produced by a team co-led by Dr. Erich Jarvis, a neurobiologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He and his colleagues decoded the genomes of 45 bird species, representing a cross-section of bird diversity, and used it to reconstruct the family relationships between them. Their work also revealed important insights into bird-song, feathers, and why some species might be at greater risk of extinction than others.

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