Life originated in “a warm little pond,” Charles Darwin wrote to Joseph J. Hooker, the founder of geographical botany within Darwin’s circle of colleagues. How, where, and when the first species got started, however, completely escaped Darwin.
In contemplating the origin of life dilemma, Darwin noted in his autobiography –
“The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us, and I, for one, must be content to remain an agnostic.”
Scientists last week proposed new evolutionary relationships among all 9,993 of the world’s known living bird species. In a letter published in the prestigious Nature journal, scientists reported on the use of DNA-sequence data to create a radiating phylogenetic tree, a revolutionary new bird tree of life (pictured left).
Walter Jetz (pictured right), an evolutionary biologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, was the leading author of the letter entitled “The global diversity of birds in space and time.” In an interview with science writer Virginia Gewin for Nature News, Jetz explains –
“This is the first dated tree of life for a class of species this size to be put on a global map.”
