Scientists Rank World's Most 'Evolutionarily Distinct' Birds
Hoatzin Geoff Gallice Is a bird more worth saving from extinction if it is evolutionarily unique, as well as physically rare? That's one challenging question raised by newly published research that factors together the distinct evolutionary history of the world's bird species, with how healthy their population numbers and prospects for survival are in the present. Arne Mooers, a professor of biodiversity at Canada's Simon Fraser University, and colleagues worked for seven years to assess how much evolutionary history a specific bird represents compared to other bird species currently alive. In order to do it, the team developed an evolutionary tree containing all 9,993 known bird species, says Mooers, and then calculated the total amount of time evolutionary processes "worked" to create those species: about 77 billion years. They then ranked the birds by how much of that work...