Talk:New World vulture
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I believe that first picture is a California Condor because of the white underwings and lack of the Andean Condor's head and neck ornamentation. I'm absolutely convinced it's not a Turkey Vulture, a bird I'm very familiar with. —JerryFriedman 19:18, 25 Aug 2004 (UTC)
[edit] Relation to Storks
My reading shows that these birds are not closely related to storks but they are more closely related than to Old World vultures or other diurnal raptors. --Droll 21:59, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
This issue deserves more thorough discussion, including references. Old World vultures seem to have certain DNA rearrangements that are unique to thats group (Cytogenetics and Cell Genetics April 2006 paper IIRC, but whether anything can be drawn from that I don't know (the other accipitrids have not been checked on that marker it seems). Altogether, molecular evidence for the Cathartidae relationships seems equivocal (and possibly suffering from the errors of early application of molecular taxonomy; I don't have any recent studies on the topic) while, morphological evidence is largely in favor of a relationship with Ciconiiformes (in general - not storks in particular!). Behavior, on the other hand, very strongly supports a ciconiiform relationship. Feeding habits are prone to fast change (in fact, they are possibly one of the driving factors of speciation, we're gonna hear more on this in 2 years or so when the research currently underway gets published), while characters like urinating on the legs are rather conservative. The evolutionary history of all taxa in question is farly well known, but the points of divergence are still a mystery or unresolvable (due to many early Neornithes presenting a mix of characters of many orders). Dysmorodrepanis 21:23, 14 May 2006 (UTC)
OK, the paper I mentioned is: Cytogenetics and Genome Research '112: 286-295. It does not mention whether this has actually been analyzed in NWVs, but it points out that Falconiformes have the most strongly rearranged genomes of all birds analyzed to date (which is to say, in all likelihood all birds since chromosomal studies are fairly bread n butter work and has been done for a long time). For some reason, in Falconiformes there exists a bias for chromosomes to aggregate until a certain size has been reached, and then to rearrange. Most birds have a medium number of large chromosomes and a large number of small chromosomes. Falconiforms have a large number of lerge and medium-sized chromosomes and very few (a handful or so) small chromosomes. So whether NWVs are falconiform could possibly be determined using nothing more serious than a good quality light microscope... Dysmorodrepanis 00:54, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
- Unfortunately, this only holds true for accipitrids. See Falconiformes article for ref. Dysmorodrepanis 17:56, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
