9726427 Mindell Birds are important to humans for food, for recreation, as indicators of environmental health, and as experimental models in applied and basic research. Despite their importance, their genealogical (evolutionary) relationships remain poorly known, restricting our ability to understand the evolutionary processes giving rise to the molecular, morphological and behavioral differences among orders of birds. One of the reasons for our limited knowledge of avian ordinal relationships is their apparent rapid diversification, with most species arising during a relatively short time-span. Resolving genealogy for rapid radiations of species such as this requires large sets of characters for numerous species, and no such data sets are currently available. In this research, David Mindell and Michael Sorenson will infer the genealogical relationships among 134 birds, including representatives of all commonly recognized avian orders, using 5,000 base pairs of mitochondrial DNA sequence from 3 protein-coding genes, 1 ribosomal gene, and 9 transfer RNA genes for each species. They will assess potential causes for differences among birds in rates of DNA sequence evolution and determine how improved knowledge of these causes may improve the efficiency and accuracy of the process of geneaology estimation , and will attempt to estimate the ages of various orders and lineages of birds.
