Recent research sequenced 48 bird species, including (from left) the budgerigar, the barn owl and the American flamingo. (Left and center)iStock; (Right) Chris Minerva/Ocean/Corbis

Thanks to National Public Radio (USA) for this podcast of a story we know our ornithologically-inclined readers will appreciate:

What do a pigeon and a flamingo have in common? Quite a bit, according to a reordering of the evolutionary tree of birds.

One of a series of studies published Thursday in Science is the latest step toward understanding the origins of the roughly 10,000 bird species that populate our planet.

“We’re finally reaching some sort of consensus about how we think birds are related to each other,” says Sushma Reddy, a researcher at Loyola University who studies bird evolution and was not involved in the new studies.

Understanding the relationships among different types of birds has been a subject of great debate among scientists because of birds’ unusual start.

Birds began as dinosaurs. And for a long time, their ancestors were just hanging around with all the other dinosaurs. That all changed roughly 66 million years ago, when a large asteroid impact triggered a mass extinction on Earth.

Though land-based dinosaurs died, a few bird ancestors survived, explains Edward Braun, a biologist who studies bird evolution at the University of Florida and contributed to the new analysis.

With the big dinos out of the way, the birds spread their wings and covered the entire globe. They quickly evolved to live at sea and on land — everywhere from deserts to the arctic.

“The major groups of birds appeared very rapidly,” Braun says.

The updated avian tree shows how many different kinds of birds evolved quickly after a mass extinction 66 million years ago. AAAS/Carla Schaffer

That’s why it so hard to tell who is related to whom. Today’s bird species all look and sound very different from each other…

Read the whole article, and/or listen the podcast, here.