Avian Phylogeny: a complete and dynamic tree of birds featuring ELIOT MILLER

Avian Phylogeny: a complete and dynamic tree of birds featuring ELIOT MILLER | Birds of the World

Рет қаралды 6,718

Ай бұрын

Our understanding of avian evolutionary relationships constantly evolves. As this understanding grows, avian taxonomy must keep pace - bird names and classifications, such as the families to which they belong, are under constant revision. To date, these changes have been parallel but somewhat disconnected processes, where phylogenetic (evolutionary) information eventually (hopefully) results in taxonomic changes.
We present early results on a project that seeks to more directly unite emerging evolutionary understanding with taxonomic revisions. By collaborating with the Open Tree of Life, we have created a modern phylogeny that can be readily updated as new evolutionary results are published, one that will one day directly link to the taxonomy and data resources used by Birds of the World.
We’ll discuss our methods for creating the phylogeny, why it's important, as well as exciting ways to combine these new tools with birdwatching itself.
Birds of the World is a powerful resource that brings deep, scholarly content from four celebrated works of ornithology into a single platform where biologists and birders can find comprehensive life history information on birds. Every bird has a story. Discover them all with Birds of the World. birdsoftheworld.org
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#aviantaxonomy #ornithology #science #birds #phylogeny #treeoflife

Пікірлер: 18

@patricedubus Ай бұрын

Thank you for this fascinating discussion. Too bad I was not able to attend it live

@Adasaur250 Ай бұрын

Cool project! Love the idea of a single overarching phylogenetic tree that is open access. It'll be cool to play around with the features to see how my birding diversity looks. As someone coming from the dinosaur paleontology side of things, I do wanna make note of the question and response at 42:03. There is virtually no debate at this point that birds are nested within Theropoda and that the "raptor" dinosaurs are their closest non-avian relatives, so birds are most definitely able to be considered as "true" dinosaurs, not just "descendants of them". As for Dinosauria being non-monophyletic, that generally comes about specifically because birds historically haven't been included in their definition, at least not in common scientific practice until the last few decades. There has been a bit of shifting regarding exactly what the relationships are among the three major clades of dinosaurs (sauropods, ornithischians, and theropods) but that is largely based on the variable coding of characters found in fragmentary remains of animals at the base of Dinosauria - and there aren't a lot of those to boot - so it's expected that there'll be some shifting as new (and hopefully better) fossils from the right time periods are found and studied. There was a 2018 paper that moved to redefine Dinosauria to ensure it included sauropods - think _Brontosaurus_ - because their phylogeny placed the group just outside of the common definition of Dinosauria - and that might be the specific study being alluded to in the video - but most subsequent analyses published since then haven't supported that phylogeny and the study's methodology itself was pretty heavily scrutinized. Worth noting that even in that analysis, birds were still safely in Dinosauria. Just dropping my few cents. But long story short, birds *are* dinosaurs!

@silverstorm3729 12 күн бұрын

I'm so grateful for in depth information like this, a lot of my research on birds seems to stop and end at the basics at most avaliable sources

@almilcargallegos32 Ай бұрын

Interesting video...

@auttosave7320 Ай бұрын

Great listen, would love an even deeper dive on “hardcore bioinformatics” haha! Thank you Cornell squad and Eliot Miller for making this possible!

@PhilipVeerman Ай бұрын

Thanks for that. Just watched from Canberra, Australia. Good and interesting. I could even get an idea of where most of the audience is from. For example, if the audience was from Australia the vote would be very different (at 18 minutes). Most people from Australia would realise the relationship connection of the honeyeater and the chat, as (the Australian) chats are now grouped with honeyeaters in our books and so not be distracted by the convergently similar sunbird and sugarbird (also of course geography that the honeyeater and chat are Australian). I was amused at the putting the Fairy Prion as linking with the swift (34 minutes). I hope no-one was confused by these examples though. That 1 species of hummingbird is not the closest relative of that species of swift. It is the closest out of those three others. It is about groups. The closest relative of that species of swift is another species of swift. Sorry to put that in there and I hope that is obvious. I learned a few other things. One vital point though, the on screen captioned narration, that presumably is automatically generated, is terrible, for the huge amount of words it got wrong. I wonder if someone could do an edit of it. It is especially bad during the long question session at the end, probably largely because many of the taxa named are words not known to the software.