Darwin's finches - where did they actually come from?
5/09/2018 01:30:00 PM
In 1835, Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos Islands and discovered a group of birds that would shape his groundbreaking theory of natural selection. Darwin's Finches are now well-known as a textbook example of animal evolution. But just where did a species synonymous with the discovery of evolution come from? A new study from The Auk: Ornithological Advances presents some of the best models to date on where these birds actually originated.
San Diego State University's Erik Funk and Kevin Burns set out to determine the ancestral biogeography - how a species' distribution varies over space and time - of Coerebinae. Coerebinae is a subfamily of birds called tanagers. This group includes the famous Darwin's Finches and their fourteen closest relatives. Using state-of-the-art statistical software, Funk and Burns modeled two competing hypotheses.
Read more at
https://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2018/05/darwins-finches-where-did-they-actually.html#BkoMQpYqWc8prbzv.99
