The Avian Tree of Life

(the above illustration can be greatly expanded here: http://cdn.phys.org/newman/gfx/news/hires/2012/firsteverfam.gif)

The genomes of modern birds tell a story of how they emerged and evolved after the mass extinction that wiped out dinosaurs and almost everything else 66 million years ago. That story is now coming to light, thanks to an ambitious international collaboration that has been underway for four years.
The first findings of the Avian Phylogenomics Consortium are being reported nearly simultaneously in 29 papers—eight papers in a Dec. 12 special issue of Science and 21 more in Genome Biology, GigaScience and other journals. The full set of papers in Science and other journals can be accessed at
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/346/6215/1308.