Afroaves is a
clade of
bird
Birds are a group of warm-blooded vertebrates constituting the class Aves (), characterised by feathers, toothless beaked jaws, the laying of hard-shelled eggs, a high metabolic rate, a four-chambered heart, and a strong yet lightweig ...
s, consisting of the kingfishers and kin (
Coraciiformes
The Coraciiformes are a group of usually colourful birds including the kingfishers, the bee-eaters, the rollers, the motmots, and the todies. They generally have syndactyly, with three forward-pointing toes (and toes 3 & 4 fused at their base) ...
), woodpeckers and kin (
Piciformes
Nine families of largely arboreal birds make up the order Piciformes , the best-known of them being the Picidae, which includes the woodpeckers and close relatives. The Piciformes contain about 71 living genera with a little over 450 species, of ...
), hornbills and kin (
Bucerotiformes
Bucerotiformes is an order of birds that contains the hornbills, ground hornbills, hoopoes and wood hoopoes. These birds were previously classified as members of Coraciiformes. The clade is distributed in Africa, Asia, Europe and Melanesia.
...
), trogons (
Trogoniformes
The trogons and quetzals are birds in the order Trogoniformes which contains only one family, the Trogonidae. The family Trogonidae contains 46 species in seven genera. The fossil record of the trogons dates back 49 million years to the Earl ...
), cuckoo roller (
Leptosomiformes), mousebirds (
Coliiformes), owls (
Strigiformes), raptors (
Accipitriformes
The Accipitriformes (; from Latin ''accipiter''/''accipitri-'' "hawk", and New Latin ''-formes'' "having the form of") are an order of birds that includes most of the diurnal birds of prey, including hawks, eagles, vultures, and kites, but not f ...
) and New World vultures (
Cathartiformes
The order Cathartiformes of raptors or birds of prey includes the New World vultures and the now-extinct Teratornithidae. These raptors are classified by most taxonomic authorities in the order Accipitriformes (which includes the eagles and hawk ...
).
The most
basal clades are predatory, suggesting the last common ancestor of Afroaves was also a predatory bird.
The following
cladogram
A cladogram (from Greek ''clados'' "branch" and ''gramma'' "character") is a diagram used in cladistics to show relations among organisms. A cladogram is not, however, an evolutionary tree because it does not show how ancestors are related to ...
of Afroaves relationships is based on Jarvis ''et al'' (2014),
with some clade names after Yury, T. ''et al.'' (2013) and Kimball ''et al.'' (2013).
[Kimball, R.T. ''et al.'' (2013) Identifying localized biases in large datasets: A case study using the Avian Tree of Life. ''Mol Phylogenet Evol''. doi:10.1016/j.ympev.2013.05.029]
Afroaves has not always been recovered as a monophyletic clade in subsequent studies. For instance, Prum ''et al.'' (2015) recovered the accipitrimorphs as the sister group to a clade (
Eutelluraves) comprising the remaining Afroavian orders and
Australaves.,
[Prum, R.O. ''et al''. (2015]
A comprehensive phylogeny of birds (Aves) using targeted next-generation DNA sequencing
Nature 526, 569–573. while an analysis by Houde ''et al''. (2019) recovered a clade of accipitrimorphs and owls as sister to the remaining landbirds.
References
Neognathae
Extant Danian first appearances
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