Birds are the most diverse land vertebrate on the planet, and now scientists have constructed a complete evolutionary tree of the 11,000 or so known species.
This data came from hundreds of studies written from 1990 to 2024, as well as additional taxonomic information on more than a thousand birds not included in those studies.
This data is now part of the Open Tree of Life (OpenTree) project—a collaboration between evolutionary biologists and taxonomists which aims to construct the evolutionary history of all known species on the planet.
When it comes to diversity, no animal can quite hold a candle to birds. Being the most genetically varied land vertebrate on the planet, the class Aves thrive on every continent. And they’re also impressive survivors, being as they’re the direct descendants of the avian dinosaurs that survived the K-T Extinction event some 66 million years ago.
Those many millions of years have given birds time to evolve into some 11,000 species, and keeping track of all those species—not to mention their evolutionary history–can be quite the challenge. Luckily, scientists from the University of California Merced and Cornell Lab of Ornithology decided that challenge was one they wanted to meet and proceeded to pour over 262 studies related to 9,239 bird species published from 1990 to 2024. After combining additional data on the 1,800 or so species not included in these studies, the team formed a complete map of avian evolutionary history. The results of this work were detailed in the journal Proceedings of the National Academies of Science (PNAS)
“People love birds, and a lot of people work on birds,” Emily Jane McTavish, the lead author of the study from UC Merced, said in a press statement. “People publish scientific papers about birds’ evolutionary relationships all the time. We synthesized all the data to have unified information all in one place.”
For years, McTavish worked on software known as the Open Tree of Life (OpenTree) project, a collaboration between evolutionary biologists and taxonomists to build a comprehensive evolutionary tree of all species on the planet—not just birds. By creating a complete evolutionary history of all known birds on the planet, the experts hope to gather research in one place and make startlingly new discoveries in the future.
“Many dozens of bird phylogenies (studies of evolutionary histories using genetics) get published every year, yet their findings—with implications for everything from taxonomy to our understanding of ancestral characters—aren’t necessarily being used for downstream research,” Eliot Miller, a visiting scientist to Cornell Lab and senior author of the study, said in a press statement. “Our project should help to close this research loop so that these studies and their findings are better incorporated into follow-up research.”
Because Cornell Lab is also in charge of popular citizen science bird tools like Merlin and eBird, this updated tree can also link with those datasets, providing even better models for scientists and birders alike. The team also designed the dataset to update automatically as new phylogenetic information about birds becomes available. Crucially, similar techniques used to construct this evolutionary tree can be applied to other groups of species as well, slowly revealing the incredible and inter-related animal diversity that spans the globe.
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