Birding item in today's VicMex press ...
[Some of you may discern an internal inconsistency in the item].
Half the world's songbirds call Australia home
By DAVID WROE
The Age, Tuesday 5 February 2002
>From the beautiful song of the nightingale to the raspy caw of the crow, the
songlines reach back to Australia where half the world's birds evolved, says a
Melbourne scientist.
Songbirds, which include most of the well-known bird species, were thought to
have emerged in the northern hemisphere before spreading south. But Museum
Victoria's head of sciences, Les Christidis, says he has proved the opposite.
"Actually, Australia was the cradle," Dr Christidis says.
With help from Swedish scientists, Dr Christidis climbed backwards down the
evolutionary branches by studying the DNA sequences of modern songbirds all over
the world, and found they had common ancestors in Australian songbirds. "The
branching pattern shows the oldest of the songbirds is actually the lyrebird,"
he says.
Songbirds - also known as passerines - then spread to the rest of the world
about 60 to 80 million years ago, around the time the massive supercontinent
Gondwana was breaking up into Australasia, South America, Africa, Antarctica and
India.
The ancestors of songbirds were isolated in Australia. They have since evolved
into some of the world's most beautiful and beloved bird species, including
nightingales, canaries and birds of paradise. They inhabit every corner of the
globe.
Another vital piece of evidence was the discovery that three small,
plain-looking species of New Zealand wrens, which were similarly isolated early
on, had very similar DNA sequences to Australian songbirds.
Australia has about 300 species of songbirds - which are characterised by the
complex musculature in their their voicebox - and the rest of the world has
about 3000 species.
"Apart from pigeons, parrots, birds of prey, most birds are songbirds," Dr
Christidis says.
His research will be published in the February edition of a prestigious British
natural history journal, The Proceedings of the Royal Society of London.
However, it might never have seen the light of day had Dr Christidis not gone
into partnership with scientists from the Swedish Museum of Natural History and
the University of Stockholm, which provided the funding.
"It's easier to get funding through them to do work on the evolution of
Australian birds than it is here," he says.
Dr Christidis has battled to have his theory taken seriously since 1988, when he
first floated the idea. Now, a US team has found similar evidence and will
publish simultaneously in the same publication.
Despite being the only first-world country in a "biodiversity hotspot",
Australia was ignoring funding for natural history research, Dr Christidis
says.
"There are more people working on Australian birds in American universities than
there are here - by about 20-fold. It's amazing."
This story was found at:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/2002/02/05/FFXZB4959XC.html
Birding-Aus is on the Web at
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