Tracking scientific discovery of avian phylogenetic diversity over 250 years

Abstract

Estimating the total number of species on Earth has been a longstanding pursuit. Models project anywhere between 2 and 10 million species, and discovery of new species continues to the present day. Despite this, we hypothesized that our current knowledge of phylogenetic diversity (PD) may be almost complete because new discoveries may be less phylogenetically distinct than past discoveries. Focusing on birds, which are well studied, we generated a robust phylogenetic tree for most extant species by combining existing published trees and calculated each discovery's marginal contribution to known PD since the first formal species descriptions in 1758. We found that PD contributions began to plateau in the early 1900s, about half a century earlier than species richness. Relative contributions of each phylogenetic order to known PD shifted over the first 150 years, with a growing contribution of the hyper-diverse perching birds (Passeriformes) in particular, but after the early 1900s this has remained relatively stable. Altogether, this suggests that our knowledge of the evolutionary history of extant birds is mostly complete, with few discoveries of high evolutionary novelty left to be made, and that conclusions of studies using avian phylogenies are likely to be robust to future species discoveries.