Gruae 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 the order
Opisthocomiformes
Opisthocomidae is a family of birds, the only named family within the order Opisthocomiformes. The only living representative is the hoatzin (''Opisthocomus hoazin'') which lives in the Amazon and the Orinoco delta in South America. Several fossi ...
(hoatzin) and
Gruimorphae
Gruimorphae is a clade of birds that contains the orders Charadriiformes (plovers, gulls, and allies) and Gruiformes (cranes and rails) identified by molecular analysis. This grouping has had historical support, as various charadriiform families ...
(shorebirds and rails) identified in 2014 by genome analysis.
[Jarvis, E.D. ''et al''. (2014]
Whole-genome analyses resolve early branches in the tree of life of modern birds
''Science'', 346(6215):1320-1331. Previous studies have placed the Hoatzin in different parts of the bird family tree; however, despite its unusual and primitive morphology, genetic studies have shown the hoatzin is not as primitive or as ancient as once thought, and that it could be a very derived bird that reverted to or retains some
plesiomorphic
In phylogenetics, a plesiomorphy ("near form") and symplesiomorphy are synonyms for an ancestral character shared by all members of a clade, which does not distinguish the clade from other clades.
Plesiomorphy, symplesiomorphy, apomorphy, an ...
traits.
[Hackett, S.J. ''et al.'' (2008) A Phylogenomic Study of Birds Reveals Their Evolutionary History. ''Science'', 320(5884):1763–1768.]
According to Suh ''et al.'' (2016), one of the problems with the conclusions about this novel clade is that independent studies (like Jarvis ''et al.'' 2014 and Prum ''et al.'' 2015)
[Prum, R. O. et al. A comprehensive phylogeny of birds (Aves) using targeted next-generation DNA sequencing. Nature (2015). ][ found very dissimilar phylogenetic relationships (like ]Inopinaves
Inopinaves is a clade of neoavian birds recovered in a compressive genomic systematic study using nearly 200 species in 2015. It contains the clades Opisthocomiformes (hoatzin) and Telluraves (core landbirds); the study shows that the hoatzin di ...
) using the same probabilistic support, such as bootstrap scores and Bayesian posterior probabilities.[Suh, A. (2016]
The phylogenomic forest of bird trees contains a hard polytomy at the root of Neoaves
''Zool. Scripta'' 45(S1), 50–62.
See also
* Inopinaves
Inopinaves is a clade of neoavian birds recovered in a compressive genomic systematic study using nearly 200 species in 2015. It contains the clades Opisthocomiformes (hoatzin) and Telluraves (core landbirds); the study shows that the hoatzin di ...
for an alternative hypothesis on the placement of the Hoatzin
References
Neognathae
Extant Campanian first appearances
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