A Collaborative Project to Resolve the Deep Nodes of Avian Phylogeny
The “Early Bird” tree of life project, funded by the NSF Assembling the Tree of Life program, is a large-scale, cooperative effort among five institutions in the U.S. to determine the evolutionary relationships among all major groups of birds. Although birds are well-studied in many ways, determining their deep relationships has been problematic and contentious. Through this project, we have collected a large amount of sequence data for all major avian lineages from multiple genes to address this problem. Recently, we published (Hackett et al. 2008, Science) an analysis of 169 avian species for 19 loci (representing about 25kb per species, and a final alignment across all taxa of about 52kb), and demonstrated that it is possible to resolve deep relationships among modern birds.

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