The biggest project of genetic study of birds, called Avian Phylogenomics Consortium, has started giving results. 29 articles have been published of which 8 on a special issue of the journal “Science” and the other 21 in “Genome Biology”, “GigaScience” and other magazines. This project engaged for four years over two hundred scientists in many institutes of twenty nations that digged deep as never before with the study of the evolution of birds showing how there was a sort of Big Bang after the extinction of the dinosaurs.

A group of researchers at the University of Adelaide and the South Australian Museum in Australia published in the journal “BMC Evolutionary Biology” an article that explains why vetulicolians, which are those belonging to the phylum Vetulicolia, could be the strangest relatives of humans.

These creatures had lived in the Cambrian, 500 million years ago, and their fossils were discovered for the first time more than a century ago, in 1911, but their taxonomic status remained uncertain. After this new research, things could change.

The research on the evolution of the fish that gave rise to the tetrapods gradually adapting to life on land are generally carried out by examining fossils such as the Tiktaalik roseae, a species dating back to the Devonian period, about 375 million years ago. Instead, a study published in the journal “Nature” was conducted by three scientists from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, studying modern fishhes, the gray bichir, also known as the Senegal bichir or Cuvier’s bichir (scientific name Polypterus senegalus), studying their behavior on land.