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I am excited to share some work I was a part of that was recently accepted at PNAS and of which I am very proud, "Earth history and the passerine superradiation." We’ve generated a phylogeny of all passerines--by far the largest order of birds, containing more than half of all living bird species. We incorporated bird fossils into our analyses and were thus able to place a time on diversification events, and analyze the evolution of the order in the context of Earth’s history. This was a pan-institutional and pan-museum-collection effort to generate and analyze data at an unprecedented scale for phylogenomics, and we are excited to finally share it. Below you will see the image that will be the PNAS cover for this issue--it is a lovely green-headed tanager taken by co-author Daniel Field in Brazil. You can see more of his photography here. See my PUBS page for the paper.  |