‘Tree of life’ constructed for all living bird species
Scientists have mapped the evolutionary relationships among all 9,993 of the world’s known living bird species. The study, published today in Nature, is an ambitious project that uses DNA-sequence data to create a phylogenetic tree — a branching map of evolutionary relationships among species — that also links global bird speciation rates across space and time.
“This is the first dated tree of life for a class of species this size to be put on a global map,” says study co-author Walter Jetz, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
