A team of international researchers has created the most extensive and intricate bird family tree ever assembled, mapping out 93 million years of evolutionary relationships among 363 bird species, covering 92% of all bird families.
This breakthrough is outlined in two complementary papers published on April 1 in Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The updated family tree, featured in Nature, unveiled insights into the evolutionary history of birds following the catastrophic mass extinction event that eradicated the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.
Scientists observed significant increases in effective population size, substitution rates, and relative brain size in early birds, providing new understanding of the adaptive mechanisms that fueled avian diversification after this pivotal event. In the companion paper published in PNAS, researchers closely examined one branch of the new family tree and discovered that flamingos and doves are less closely related than previous genome-wide analyses had indicated.
This work is part of the Bird 10,000 Genomes (B10K) Project, a collaborative initiative led by the University of Copenhagen, Zhejiang University, and UC San Diego, with the goal of generating draft genome sequences for approximately 10,500 existing bird species.
“Our objective is to reconstruct the complete evolutionary history of all birds,” stated Siavash Mirarab, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, who is a co-senior author on the Nature paper and the first and co-corresponding author on the PNAS paper.
2024-04-01 17:51:04
Post from phys.org