This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science.

I'm Steve Mursky.

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In a massive data crunching analysis,

researchers have created a new evolutionary tree for birds.

The effort required enormous computing power and new algorithms

because it involved the whole genomes rather than just a few genes

of 48 species of birds to establish their relatedness.

The study is the first of its kind for vertebrates.

It contradicts morphology-based trees.

It contradicts myotochondrial trees. It contradicts myotochondrial trees. It supports more trees

based upon nuclear genes, although those trees weren't highly resolved and this

one is.

Eric Jarvis of the Howard U's Medical Institute and Duke University Medical and related to this work are in the December 12th special issue of the journal

Science. Jarvis previewed the studies in a talk he gave October 19th at the

Science Writers 2014 meeting in Columbus, Ohio. We decided we wanted to make a big effort to focus on birds

because each of us had some aspects

that we'd liked about bird biology.

But something was practical about that as well.

Bird genomes in terms of genome size

compared to other vertebrate groups like reptiles,

amphibians, mammals, they're on average smaller

...