Spring 2002 -- Vol. 19, No. 1

Aquatic Bird Genes Reveal Surprising Relationships

Believe it or not, this long-legged flamingo is most closely related to the stubby little grebe. "We never imagined the flamingo and the grebe would turn out to be closest relatives, and were so surprised by this outcome that we did additional examinations using different sources of flamingo and grebe genetic material ... but we still obtained the same results," Penn State evolutionary biologist Blair Hedges says."A lot of people may have trouble believing the results from these genetic studies for a while, but they carry a lot of weight because we have so much data from two different techniques, and it all paints the the same picture of the evolutionary history of aquatic birds."

Photo Credit: Julie Morgan, Bonaire, Dutch Caribbean

Details about the work, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, can be found here.

Photo credit: Jerry Ligon, Bonaire, Dutch Caribbean

Back to Science Journal Spring 2002 Index

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