Not sure if this one has come up as I've been away in Uganda, PNG, New
Caledonia and Fiji and have lost the thread of what's been happening.
Anyway there's a recent excellent and very thought provoking paper on
the Phylogeny and evolution of the Meliphagoidea, the largest
radiation of Australasian songbirds, by Janet L. Gardner, John
Trueman, Daniel Ebert, Leo Joseph and Robery Magrath in Molecular
Physics and Evolution 55 (2010) It has a few fascinating insights from
their analysis of DNA material, which I'll summarize as follows:
Scrubtit is sister to the whitefaces, a very unexpected finding.
Bristlebirds do not include the Pilotbird as has sometimes been
suggested, the latter being placed in the Acanthizidae. The family
Dasyornithidae (Bristlebirds) comes next to Maluridae (Fairywrens)
within the Meliphagoidea.
Fernwren (Oreoscopus) is sister to all other Acanthizids, but it has
been suggested that the Goldenface (Dwarf Whistler) of New Guinea is
itself sister to Fernwren, a very unexpected finding, though that
species has long been anomalous and clearly out of place in whistlers.
Retaining Hylacola as separate from Calamanthus appears to be a matter
of choice, and Redthroat and Speckled Warbler are each other's closest
relatives, so the genus Pyrrholaemus (Redthroat) could include
Chthonicola (Speckled Warbler)
Rock Warbler (Origma) is sister to the New Guinea Mouse Warblers
(Crateroscelis), which are sister to Sericornis.
One surprise is that Tasmanian Scrubwren is sister to Atherton
Scrubwren (S. keri), and not the morphologically similar and
geographically much closer White-browed Scrubwren, so they find no
support for lumping Tasmanian and White-browed Scrubwrens.
Phil Gregory
Sicklebill Safaris / Cassowary House
Website 2: Http://www.cassowary-house.com.au
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