Phaethoquornithes is a

clade In biology, a clade (), also known as a Monophyly, monophyletic group or natural group, is a group of organisms that is composed of a common ancestor and all of its descendants. Clades are the fundamental unit of cladistics, a modern approach t ...

of birds that contains

Eurypygimorphae Eurypygimorphae or Phaethontimorphae is a clade of birds that contains the orders Phaethontiformes (tropicbirds) and Eurypygiformes (kagu and sunbittern) recovered by genome analysis. The relationship was first identified in 2013 based on thei ...

and Aequornithes, which was first recovered by genome analysis in 2014. Members of Eurypygimorphae were originally classified in the obsolete group

Metaves Metaves ("other birds") is a controversial group proposed by Fain & Houde (2004) and later rescued on the studies of Ericson ''et al.'' (2006)Ericson, P.G.P. ''et al.'' (2006Diversification of Neoaves: integration of molecular sequence data and f ...

, and Aequornithes were classified as the sister taxon to

Musophagiformes The turacos make up the bird family Musophagidae ( "banana-eaters"), which includes ''plantain-eaters'' and ''go-away-bird , go-away-birds''. In southern Africa both turacos and go-away-birds are commonly known as loeries. They are Dactyly#Zygo ...

Gruiformes The Gruiformes ( ) are an order containing a considerable number of living and extinct bird families, with a widespread geographical diversity. Gruiform means "crane-like". Traditionally, a number of wading and terrestrial bird families that ...

. This group has also been informally called Ardeae. Older classifications have used Ardeae in a different sense, as a suborder of

Ciconiiformes Storks are large, long-legged, long-necked wading birds with long, stout bills. They belong to the family Ciconiidae, and make up the order Ciconiiformes . Ciconiiformes previously included a number of other families, such as herons and ibise ...

containing

herons Herons are long-legged, long-necked, freshwater and coastal birds in the family Ardeidae, with 75 recognised species, some of which are referred to as egrets or bitterns rather than herons. Members of the genus '' Botaurus'' are referred to as ...

and related species. George Sangster and colleagues in 2022 named and defined this clade in the ''

PhyloCode The ''International Code of Phylogenetic Nomenclature'', known as the ''PhyloCode'' for short, is a formal set of rules governing phylogenetic nomenclature. Its current version is specifically designed to regulate the naming of clades, leaving the ...

'' as the least inclusive crown clade containing '' Phaethon aethereus'' and '' Pelecanus onocrotalus'', but not '' Apus apus'', '' Charadrius hiaticula'', '' Musophaga violacea'', or ''

Passer domesticus The house sparrow (''Passer domesticus'') is a bird of the sparrow family Passeridae, found in most parts of the world. It is a small bird that has a typical length of and a mass of . Females and young birds are coloured pale brown and grey, ...

''.

Cladogram A cladogram (from Greek language, Greek ''clados'' "branch" and ''gramma'' "character") is a diagram used in cladistics to show relations among organisms. A cladogram is not, however, an Phylogenetic tree, evolutionary tree because it does not s ...

based on Kuhl ''et al''. (2020) and Stiller ''et al''. (2024),Stiller, J., Feng, S., Chowdhury, AA. et al. Complexity of avian evolution revealed by family-level genomes. Nature (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07323-1 with clade names following Sangster ''et al'' (2022).

References

Neognathae {{bird-stub