As regular CFZ-watchers will know, for some time Corinna has been doing a column for Animals & Men and a regular segment on On The Track... particularly about out-of-place birds and rare vagrants. There seem to be more and more bird stories from all over the world hitting the news these days so, to make room for them all - and to give them all equal and worthy coverage - she has set up this new blog to cover all things feathery and Fortean.

Wednesday 16 December 2015

Study uncovers influence of Earth's history on the dawn of modern birds

December 11th 2015

bird
House finch Credit: Wikimedia Commons
New research led by the American Museum of Natural History reveals that the evolution of modern birds was greatly shaped by the history of our planet's geography and climate. The DNA-based work, published today in the journal Science Advances, finds that birds arose in what is now South America around 90 million years ago, and radiated extensively around the time of the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event that killed off the non-avian dinosaurs. The new research suggests that birds in South America survived this event and then started moving to other parts of the world via multiple land bridges while diversifying during periods of global cooling.

"Modern birds are the most diverse group of terrestrial vertebrates in terms of species richness and global distribution, but we still don't fully understand their large-scale evolutionary history," said Joel Cracraft, a curator in the Museum's Department of Ornithology and co-author of the paper. "It's a difficult problem to solve because we have very large gaps in the fossil record. This is the first quantitative analysis estimating where birds might have arisen, based on the best phylogenetic hypothesis that we have today."

Cracraft and lead author Santiago Claramunt, a research associate in the Museum's Department of Ornithology, analyzed DNA sequences for most modern bird families with information from 130 fossil birds to generate a new evolutionary time tree.


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