“If you’ve seen one little brown bird, you’ve seen them all.”
As any beginning bird watcher can tell you, many bird species tend to look alike, even those that are not at all related. On the other hand, close relatives may look very different. But appearances and behaviour can be deceiving: for example, parrots and songbirds don’t look or act much alike yet they are each other’s closest relatives (here).
“Science is a process that never ends”, says Shannon Hackett, associate curator of birds at The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
“You come up with a conclusion and then that conclusion is subject to being revised or changed as new data are generated for questions.”
Recently, new data have profoundly and dramatically changed our knowledge of avian relationships and how birds evolved their “endless forms most beautiful”. These new scientific insights are the inevitable outcome of innovations and improvements to a variety of technologies -- the ability to sequence and compare larger portions of genomes and the development of faster computers, for starters.
“New technologies lead to new questions that lead to new data”, explains Dr Hackett. “It’s an open-ended process.”
Another contribution to our growing appreciation of avian systematics comes from the growing number of scientific collaborations that cross geographic and institutional boundaries. (These collaborations are probably facilitated and nurtured by increasing reliance on digital technologies and online resources.)
One such partnership, the highly collaborative large-scale project, Early Bird, is centred at The Field Museum and is under the guidance of Dr Hackett. Early Bird’s goal is to address the big-picture question of how all bird species fit into the avian Tree of Life. This collaboration relies upon the many and varied skills found within a vast flock of people, institutions, and collections. Museums play a significant role in studies like this because they house large collections of bird specimens that provide the DNA necessary to support such vast studies.
Of course, new discoveries mean that museums must re-arrange their displays accordingly, that publishers must publish new books and field guides to reflect new findings, and ornithologists and birders must update their understanding of the avian portion of the Tree of Life.
In today’s “Museum Monday” video, we meet some of the lead scientists -- Shannon Hackett, John Bates, and Dave Willard -- at The Field Museum whose work is shedding new light on the evolutionary relationships of birds (i. e.; doi:10.1126/science.1157704; also read this piece that I wrote about that paper.)
The Field Museum can be found on twitter @FieldMuseum.
Additional reading:
Journal club: “Early birds shake up Avian Tree of Life” (GrrlScientist; ScienceBlogs; 26 June 2008)
Journal Club: “Jumping genes capture deep relationships between parrots and songbirds” (GrrlScientist; SciLogs; 25 October 2011)
Shannon J. Hackett, Rebecca T. Kimball, Sushma Reddy, Rauri C. K. Bowie, Edward L. Braun, Michael J. Braun, Jena L. Chojnowski, W. Andrew Cox, Kin-Lan Han, John Harshman, Christopher J. Huddleston, Ben D. Marks, Kathleen J. Miglia, William S. Moore, Frederick H. Sheldon, David W. Steadman, Christopher C. Witt, and Tamaki Yuri (2008). A Phylogenomic Study of Birds Reveals Their Evolutionary History, Science, 320 (5884) 1763-1768. doi:10.1126/science.1157704 [$]
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When she’s not reading the latest news about avian phylogeny and systematics, GrrlScientist is very active on twitter @GrrlScientist and sometimes lurks on social media: facebook, G+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
