The Taxonomy Thread

A revised phylogeny of birds, based on a powerful genetic data set, has been published: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature15697.html

Prum, R.O., Berv, J.S., Dornburg, A., Field, D.J., Townsend, J.P., Lemmon, E.M. & Lemmon, A.R. (2015) A comprehensive phylogeny of birds (Aves) using targeted next-generation DNA sequencing. Nature, advance online publication

It seems very neat and tidy, with a few unusual clades, but mostly strongly congruent with other recent phylogenies. Hoatzin now at the base of the main land bird clade, sister to the hawks, owls, coraciimorphiae, seriema-falcons-parrots, and passerines. Basal clades largely unchanged, although some of the groupings are new to me - pigeons form a clade with turacos, cuckoos and bustards for example.

Worth checking out if interested in the bird phylogeny.
 
zooboy28 said:
Basal clades largely unchanged, although some of the groupings are new to me - pigeons form a clade with turacos, cuckoos and bustards for example.
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Thinking about it, this proposed clade does make sense to me :) I presume sandgrouse are also within this clade?
 
LaughingDove said:
Very interesting. Thanks for posting.
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No problem. :cool:

@TLD; The paper is open access so well worth a look, especially the tree, which is clear and nicely illustrated. As LaugingDove said, the mesites and sandgrouse are sister to the pigeons, and that clade is sister to the cuckoos, turacos and bustards.
 
I'm not sure if this is mentioned, but back in early August a few studies have probably evidenced that marsupial moles may not be marsupials, but the last remaining remnants of an order once common throughout the Jurassic to the Paleogene eras, Dryolestida https://peerj.com/preprints/755.pdf
 
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Whoa. First, that's a huge paper. Second, I read good chunks of it. Third, if this is true, then there's a 4th branch of the mammalian family alive - mind blown.
 
jbnbsn99 said:
Whoa. First, that's a huge paper. Second, I read good chunks of it. Third, if this is true, then there's a 4th branch of the mammalian family alive - mind blown.
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Yeah, it's pretty crazy. Hopefully more studies are run so we can prove that this rather bizarre animal is a remnant of once-common animals. :)
 
that is interesting indeed. The paper is actually from December last year (not August this year) and it has not been peer-reviewed.

It would be amazing if marsupial moles proved to be dryolestids but just from skeletal morphology that won't really be able to be conclusively proven, especially with some of the arguments used within this paper (there are a lot of tenuous associations there). From what I gather from some googling the genetics still support them still being a marsupial.
 
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