Story from Evolution News about a new study exploring the genomes of birds.

Excerpt:

The evidence for intelligent design just keeps getting stronger. It’s long been known that the Cambrian explosion isn’t the only explosion of organisms in the fossil record. There’s also something of a fish explosion, an angiosperm explosion, and a mammal explosion. Paleontologists have even cited a “bird explosion,” with major bird groups appearing in a short time period. Frank Gill’s 2007 textbook Ornithology observes the “explosive evolution” of major living bird groups, and a paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolutiontitled “Evolutionary Explosions and the Phylogenetic Fuse” explains:

A literal reading of the fossil record indicates that the early Cambrian (c. 545 million years ago) and early Tertiary (c. 65 million years ago) were characterized by enormously accelerated periods of morphological evolution marking the appearance of the animal phyla, and modern bird and placental mammal orders, respectively.

Now, a massive genetic study published in Science has confirmed the fossil evidence that birds arose explosively. According to an article titled, “Rapid bird evolution after the age of dinosaurs unprecedented”:

His research helped confirm that some of the first lineages of modern birds appeared about 100 million years ago but that almost all of the modern groups of birds diversified in a small window of less than 10 million years, just after the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid.

Another news article calls it a “‘Big Bang’ of bird evolution” and one of the technical papers uses the same language:

Paleobiological and molecular evidence suggests that such “big bang” radiations occurred for neoavian birds (e.g., songbirds, parrots, pigeons, and others) and placental mammals, representing 95% of extant avian and mammalian species, after the Cretaceous to Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction event about 66 million years ago (Ma).

The article further cites “an explosive diversification within Neoaves.” So both fossil and genetic evidence suggests diverse organisms arose in an “explosion” or “big bang” that lasted “less than 10 million years.”

I am excited to hear about this! Birds are my most favorite creatures in the whole world!

One of the other papers they looked at in the post found large numbers of species appearing within a 1-3 million year window.

The data from these genome studies also conflicts with the phylogenies that are different from phylogenies built from body plans.

Look:

[T]his molecular study has separated many groups previously thought to be closely related by morphological studies, as is made very clear from Figure 1 of the paper. Bird relations are thus quickly becoming a classic case of conflict between molecule-based and morphology-based trees. As Nature notes, in this study “the tree of life for birds has been redrawn by geneticists.” They simply appeal to convergent evolution (or other mechanisms) to explain away these non-tree-like patterns.

It’s not a tree – it’s a lawn.