Genomic anamolies dating back to the time of the dinosaurs misled scientists about the evolutionary history of birds.
An enormous meteor spelled doom for most dinosaurs 65 million years ago. But not all. In the aftermath of the extinction event, birds -- technically dinosaurs themselves -- flourished.
"My lab has been chipping away at this problem of bird evolution for longer than I want to think about," said Edward Braun, Ph.D., the senior author of the paper published in theand a professor of biology at the University of Florida."We had no idea there would be a big chunk of the genome that behaved unusually. We kind of stumbled onto it."
Ten years ago, Braun and his collaborators pieced together a family tree for the Neoaves, a group that includes the vast majority of bird species. Based on the genomes of 48 species, they split the Neoaves into two big categories: doves and flamingos in one group, all the rest in the other. When repeating a similar analysis this year using 363 species, a different family tree emerged that split up doves and flamingos into two distinct groups.
Investigating this spot, Braun's team noticed it was not as mixed together as it should have been over millions of years of sexual reproduction. Like humans, birds combine genes from a father and a mother into the next generation. But birds and humans alike first mix the genes they inherited from their parents when creating sperm and eggs. This process is called recombination, and it maximizes a species' genetic diversity by making sure no two siblings are quite the same.
Plants of the spoonweed group time-and-again quickly adapted to a changing climate during the Ice Ages of the last two million years. Evolutionary biologists and botanists used genomic analyses to ...
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