Scientists Unveil Bird Family Tree Showing Connection between Bird Groups

Prum said in the last 10 years, historical origins of ostriches and their relatives were well established and so was the case for ducks, chickens, and their relatives.

In their study, the researchers put an emphasis on the bird group entitled Neoaves.

They come in many shapes, sizes and hues, from Cuba’s tiny bee hummingbird to the flightless ostrich of Africa’s plains, Antarctica’s emperor penguin and the Southern Ocean’s majestic wandering albatross.

“It implies that all of those aquatic birds could have developed from a single frequent ancestor, versus evolving an aquatic ecology a number of instances independently”, Cornell College ornithologist Jacob Berv mentioned.

The completion of the avian tree of life will allow researchers to definitively investigate many outstanding questions in the evolutionary history of birds, Prum said.

Humming birds reply heavily on vision and arose from nocturnal ancestors. But scientists on Wednesday showed the largest profile of the feathered family tree ever specially made, styling how modern day bird programs interfere with based around genome-wide files from 198 lives bird group. The new family tree also confirmed that the land birds evolved from a predatory ancestor, citing an example that the woodpecker and the chickadee were having a common ancestor as vicious, hawklike meat-eater.

According to Reuters, the new research also revealed that modern birds might have evolved from three surviving bird lineages after the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

How all the modern birds evolved?

The study revealed that water birds are closely related, thing which mean they appeared in aquatic areas after the disappearance of dinosaurs. 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. Among these, Archaeopteryx was estimated to be the one of the first to have evolved, about 150 million years ago.

“Living birds have a very long and complex history. Any try to grasp their biology at a broad scale requires an understanding of this deep historic context”, Berv stated. How they act, where they live, what they look like, how they communicate: “it’s all linked to how they evolved in relation to each other”.

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

The study was published on October 7 in Nature journal.