Feast your eyes on the first complete evolutionary tree diagram for all recognize modern bird mintage . It ’s thorough , colorful , and beautiful to behold – a petty like an avicularHillis Plot . But for all that this diagram order us about shuttlecock ’ evolutionary histories , what ’s really interesting is what it says about how birds preserve to acquire today .
It ’s Okay to be Smart‘s Joe Hanson explain :
It was think that any give coinage would enlarge and branch out quickly into race ( like the many unlike kinds of honeybees ) , soon maxing out its environment and filling all the ecological “ niches ” . Then , competition over limited resources would thin that down to the few most adaptable specie . This tree says the opposite , that birds are continuing to diversify even today , and fast .
The center of this tree , anchoring branch built using fossil and DNA sequence data point , attain back nearly 50 million years , to the earliest days of birds branching off of dinosaur .
Read the original study inNature , or these excellent synopses atIt ’s Okay to be SmartandScience News .
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