Neoaves


Neoaves is a clade that consists of all modern birds with the exception of Paleognathae and Galloanserae. Almost 95% of the roughly 10,000 known species of modern birds belong to the Neoaves.
The early diversification of the various neoavian groups occurred very rapidly around the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, and attempts to resolve their relationships with each other have resulted initially in much controversy.

Phylogeny

The early diversification of the various neoavian groups occurred very rapidly around the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. As a result of the rapid radiation attempts to resolve their relationships have produced conflicting results, some quite controversial, especially in the earlier studies. Nevertheless, some recent large phylogenomic studies of Neoaves have led to much progress on defining orders and supraordinal groups within Neoaves, even though they have failed to come to a consensus on an overall high order topology of these groups. A genomic study of 48 taxa by Jarvis et al. divided Neoaves into two main clades, Columbea and Passerea, but an analysis of 198 taxa by Prum et al. recovered different groupings for the earliest split in Neoaves. A reanalysis with an extended dataset by Reddy et al. suggested this was due the type of sequence data, with coding sequences favouring the Prum topology. The disagreement on topology even with large phylogenomic studies led Suh to propose a hard polytomy of nine clades as the base of Neoaves. An analysis by Houde et al. recovered Columbea and a reduced hard polytomy of six clades within Passerea.
Nevertheless, these studies do agree on a number of supraorderal groups, which Reddy et al. dubbed the "magnificent seven", which together with three "orphaned orders" make up Neoaves. Significantly, they both include a large waterbird clade and a large landbird clade. The groups defined by Reddy et al. are as follows:
  1. Telluraves
  2. Aequornithes
  3. Eurypygimorphae
  4. Otidimorphae
  5. Strisores
  6. Columbimorphae
  7. Mirandornithes
 
The following cladogram illustrates the proposed relationships between all neoavian bird orders using the supraordinal tree recovered by Prum, R.O. et al., with some taxon names following Yuri, T. et al. and Kimball et al..