New research challenges long-held assumptions of flightless bird...(single flightless common ancestor of the...)

Date:9/3/2008

single flightless common ancestor of the ratites lived on the supercontinent of Gondwana, which slowly broke up into Africa, South America, Australia and New Zealand; once divided, the ancestor species evolved slightly in each new location to produce the differences among the present-day ratites, Braun said.

But in light of this new information, he said it's more likely that the ratites' ancestors distributed themselves among the southern continents after the breakup of Gondwana, which began about 167 million years ago, in a much more obvious way.

They flew.

Although these new revelations teach evolutionary scientists a great deal, they also pose a great many new questions. For example, why did these birds evolve into such similar organisms in such different environments?

"To know for sure, we'll have to go into the lab and really study the genetics underlying the ratites' developmental pathway," Braun said. "But nobody would have asked that question without the type of data we've collected, which raises the question in the first place."

The scientists' effort to analyze such a tremendous amount of genetic material collected from birds across the globe is in turn just a single part of a program called Assembling the Tree of Life, funded and organized by the National Science Foundation, which aims to assemble a body of similar research for every group of organisms on the planet, including animals, plants, fungi, algae and bacteria.

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Contact: Edward Braun ebraun68@ufl.edu 352-846-1124 University of Florida Source:Eurekalert

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