The study was made by scientists from different universities such as Yale University and Florida State University. But scientists on Wednesday revealed the largest profile of the feathered family tree ever drawn up, mentioning how modern day bird parties interfere with based upon genome-wide statistics from 198 residing bird variety. The research also reveal about how modern birds evolved from the original three dinosaur lineages that had survived the great extinction more than 66 million years ago. This discovery rejects the previous idea according to which the water birds evolved from many individual lineages.
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In their study, the researchers put an emphasis on the bird group entitled Neoaves.
In the past few decades the historical origins of ostriches, emus, ducks, and chickens have come to light.
They found Neoaves comprised five distinct sub-groups, and were surprised to learn that one of these, the water birds, spanned all diving, wading and shorebirds like pelicans, albatrosses, gulls, flamingos and storks, although not the duck lineage. Researchers told Reuters in their article “Ruffling the feathers: scientists formulate bird family tree”, that most aquatic birds might have evolved from single common ancestor as “opposed to evolving an aquatic ecology multiple times independently”, Cornell University ornithologist Jacob Berv told Reuters.
The researchers could also discover other interesting facts, such as the fact that nocturnal species represent the ancestors of vision-dependent hummingbirds. The earliest was the crow-sized Archaeopteryx which lived 150 million years ago.
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.
Birds had been the one department of the dinosaur household tree to outlive the mass extinction sixty six million years in the past following an asteroid impression. “That’s when the fun really begins”. “Any try to grasp their biology at a broad scale requires an understanding of this deep historic context”, Berv stated.
“It’s critical to every area of bird biology. 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”.
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“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”.
