‘For the first time, all avian evolutionary relationships revealed’

That’s the title given to publicity at Phys.org
for an article by Lorena Anderson (U of California – Merced) for a new paper by McTavish et al 2025 at Cornell who “have mapped the evolutiion of every known bird species.”

That’s quite a claim! The title for the paper is “A complete and dynamic tree of birds.” Again, another grand claim. Unfortunately, no fossil taxa were included.

“They created a complete evolutionary tree of bird species by combining data on 9,239 species published in nearly 300 studies between 1990 and 2024 and additional curated data on another 1,000 species.”

So, it’s a supertree analysis, the kind of analysis in which scientists don’t have to see any specimens. That never works out so well.

Unfortunately
the words ‘cladogram’, ‘fossil’, ‘Archaeopteryx‘, ‘phenomic’ and ‘genomic’ are not found in the text. Instead the authors report, “This synthesis provides an evolutionary framework to harness trait data, phylogenetic inferences, collections data, observation records, and taxonomic concepts, in shareable, reusable, interoperable datastores.”

Figure 1. McTavish etal cladogram includes only extant bird families. ” data-image-caption=”

Figure 1. McTavish etal cladogram includes only extant bird families.

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Figure 1. McTavish etal cladogram includes only extant bird families.

These text omissions were answered
when the cladogram (Fig 1) was downloaded. It includes no extinct taxa.

Note in the McTavish et al cladogram
(Fig 1) tinamous are the basalmost taxa (more or less matching the LRT) followed by ducks (not matching the LRT), followed by curassows, quails, pheasants (related to each other, but not primitive in the LRT) then bustards, (matching the LRT), pheasants, cuckoos, pigeons, rails, etc. Meat-eating falcons nest here with seed-eating parrots, apart from meat-eating owls and vultures. I could not find families for penguins and ostriches + rheas, but those were likely hidden away among the 9000+ species included (Fig 1).

So this appears to be a genomic tree reflecting collected gene studies.
Gene studies too often differ from trait studies, not only because they omit fossil taxa, but gene studies fail to match trait studies across broad gamuts = deep time. That means gene studies and their derived supertree studies (Fig 1) too often produce false positives not modeling micro-evolutionary changes that trait trees recover. That means the McTavish et al paper was a waste of time and effort.

That means
the large reptile tree (LRT, 2338 taxa) remains the only trait-based study of extant birds that includes a long list fossil bird and theropod taxa.

Test both trait and gene studies yourself
to find out for yourself which method produces a tenable model of evolutionary events and changes and includes fossil taxa. Taxon exclusion remains the number one problem in paleontology. Trusting gene studies is number two.

References
McTavish EJ et al. (8 co-authors) 2025. A complete and dynamic tree of birds. PNAS 122(18) 1–8.

Publicity
phys.org/news/2025-04-avian-evolutionary-relationships-revealed.html