An international team of scientists has reconstructed the largest and most detailed bird family tree to date, delineating 93 million years of evolutionary relationships between 363 bird species using cutting-edge computational methods. The study, published in Nature and PNAS, revealed insights into avian diversification following the mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs, and corrected previous misconceptions about the evolutionary relationships between bird species. The advanced computational tools developed by engineers at the University of California San Diego played a crucial role in analyzing vast amounts of genomic data with high accuracy and speed, paving the way for the construction of the most comprehensive bird family tree ever assembled.
A study published in PLOS ONE quantifies the impact of exceptional fossil preservation sites on our understanding of evolutionary relationships between fossil groups, finding that the diverse and well-preserved fossil lizard record in the Late Cretaceous Gobi Desert has a significant influence on our understanding of squamate evolution. The study highlights the importance of complete skeletons in tracing relationships through time and emphasizes the impact of depositional environments on the preservation of different groups in the fossil record.
Researchers have successfully extracted genetic information from 2-million-year-old teeth belonging to Paranthropus robustus, an ancient human relative. These protein sequences, the oldest ever recovered, provide insights into the evolutionary relationships between different hominin species. The study utilized mass spectrometry to analyze amino acids in the enamel of the teeth, revealing the presence of a male-specific protein in two samples. The findings contribute to our understanding of human evolution and highlight the potential of ancient protein studies in reconstructing the history of hominins. However, some scientists caution that bone shape remains a more reliable method for untangling evolutionary relationships.
