'Early bird' project really gets the worm

The results of the study are so broad that the scientific names of dozens of birds will have to be changed, and biology textbooks and birdwatchers' field guides will have to be revised.

LSU participants in the study include: Fred Sheldon, director of the LSU MNS; Ben Marks, recent graduate of LSU's biological sciences doctoral program; and Chris Witt, former LSU graduate student and current assistant professor in the Department of Biology and Museum of Southwestern Biology at the University of New Mexico.

For more than five years, the Early Bird Project, funded by the National Science Foundation's "Assembling the Tree-of-Life" research program, has been collecting DNA sequence data from all major living groups of birds.

"One thing that makes this project unique is its breadth; both in its taxonomic scope and in terms of the amount and type of data we collected," said Marks.

Thus far, scientists have built and analyzed a dataset of more than 32 kilobases of nuclear DNA sequences from 19 different locations on the DNA of each of 169 bird species.

"This paper makes tremendous strides toward determining the evolutionary relationships of the major branches in the bird family tree," said Witt. "It uses DNA sequences to infer key events in the diversification of birds that happened tens of millions of years ago."

For example, we now know that: