A Yale-led scientific team has
produced the most comprehensive family tree for birds to date, connecting all
living bird species — nearly 10,000 in total — and revealing surprising new
details about their evolutionary history and its geographic context.
Analysis of the family tree
shows when and where birds diversified — and that birds’ diversification rate
has increased over the last 50 million years, challenging the conventional
wisdom of biodiversity experts.
“It’s the first time that we
have — for such a large group of species and with such a high degree of
confidence — the full global picture of diversification in time and space,”
said biologist Walter Jetz of Yale, lead author of the team’s research paper,
published Oct. 31 online in the journal Nature.
He continued: “The research
highlights how heterogeneously fast diversifying species groups are distributed
throughout the family tree and over geographic space. Many parts of the globe
have seen a variety of species groups diversify rapidly and recently. All this
leads to a diversification rate in birds that has been increasing over the past
50 million years.”
The researchers relied heavily
on fossil and DNA data, combining them with geographical information to produce
the exhaustive family tree, which includes 9,993 species known to be alive now.
Continued: http://news.yale.edu/2012/10/31/exhaustive-family-tree-birds-shows-recent-rapid-diversification
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