Ben Creisler
Some recent avian papers:
Carolina Acosta Hospitaleche & Marcelo Reguero (2020)
Additional Pelagornithidae remains from Seymour Island, Antarctica.
Journal of South American Earth Sciences Article 102504
doi:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsames.2020.102504 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0895981120300171Highlights
Two new mandibles of Pelagornithidae from Antarctica are reported.
The specimens described here belong to large Pelagornithidae, assigned to morpho-type 1.
The new materials analyzed here extend the record of the pseudo-toothed belonging to morphotype 1 from the Ypressian to the Priabonian.
The time of greatest diversification of pseudo-tooth birds in Antarctica (middle-late? Eocene) coincides with this evolutionary event on a global scale.
Abstract
Two incomplete mandibles are assigned to Pelagornithidae given the presence of a well marked neurovascular furrow and the unique bony projections, or "pseudo-teeth", along the crista tomialis. Specimens IAA-Pv 175 from Ypresian levels of La Meseta Alloformation (Cucullaea I Allomember), and IAA-Pv 823 from Bartonian beds of the Submeseta Alloformation, in Seymour Island (Antarctic Peninsula, West Antarctica) corresponds to the morpho-type 1, previously proposed for Antarctic pseudo-tooth birds.
The intermediate condition of the pseudo-teeth of these specimens reinforces the idea that diet changed from piscivory to molluscivory along the evolutive history of the group.
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To elucidate the relationships and spatial range evolution across the world of the bird genus Turdus (Aves), we produced a large genomic dataset comprising ca 2 million nucleotides for ca 100 samples representing 53 species, including over 2000 loci. We estimated time-calibrated maximum-likelihood and multispecies coalescent phylogenies and carried out biogeographic analyses. Our results indicate that there have been considerably fewer trans-oceanic dispersals within the genus Turdus than previously suggested, such that the Palaearctic clade did not originate in America and the African clade was not involved in the colonization of the Americas. Instead, our findings suggest that dispersal from the Western Palaearctic via the Antilles to the Neotropics might have occurred in a single event, giving rise to the rich Neotropical diversity of Turdus observed today, with no reverse dispersals to the Palaearctic or Africa. Our large multilocus dataset, combined with dense species-level sampling and analysed under probabilistic methods, brings important insights into historical biogeography and systematics, even in a scenario of fast and spatially complex diversification.