Scientists unveiled the mystery of Avain family tree

Birds not included in the study were ostriches and a group, including chickens and ducks.

“It means that all of these aquatic birds may have evolved from a single common ancestor, as opposed to evolving an aquatic ecology multiple times independently”, Cornell University ornithologist Jacob Berv said. “So the frequent ancestor of the woodpecker and the chickadee in your backyard was a vicious, hawk-like meat-eater”, Prum mentioned.

Birds evolved from small featured dinosaurs. The earliest was crow-sized Archaeopteryx from a hundred and fifty million years in the past. Bird was the only branch of dinosaurs that was able to survive an asteroid hit the earth millions of years ago and wiped out the giant creatures. Modern birds evolved from the three surviving bird lineages. “Any attempt to understand their biology at a broad scale requires an understanding of this deep historical context”, said Berv.

“It’s essential to each space of chook biology”.

The network of relationships existing between the species of birds over time had been one of the most complicated evolutionary data there is.

These are amongst a whole bunch of different tales that make up the historical past of birds revealed in an enormous genomic evaluation of 198 species of birds.

Rick Prum, the senior author of the study and a professor of ornithology, ecology and evolutionary biology, said that this signifies the possible end of avian evolutionary theories. Richard said that the vision capability of these humming birds links to the fact that nocturnal birds must be having color vision more than 10 million years ago. Despite these huge findings, the evolutionary history of 90 percent of contemporary birds in the Neoaves group has remained a mystery. The ancestors of thousands of these species appear to have evolved within a few million years after the last dinosaurs’ extinction.

The new study, published in the journal Nature, also reveals fascinating relationships among living birds within the group.

Most of aquatic birds in the world like pelicans, gulls and cranes are also closely linked to each other.

Another discovery brought to light that hummingbirds likely developed from nocturnal bird species, and the ancient ancestor of the innocuous cardinal and woodpecker was actually a ferocious predatory bird.

“Once we have the complete tree, we can start to study the patterns and processes that have given rise to all the wonderful diversity of living birds”.