So Opie reminded me that while I talked a little bit about my project, I could have talked more about phylogenies and how we actually come up with these crazy trees.
Not trees like the ones across the street in central park. These are family trees, much like those you can make that describe your relationship to your parents and siblings. However, these describe similarities between species. More recently, this is done with genetics. However, the bones and genetics don't always line up perfectly. With birds, we haven't been able to figure out specific patterns with anything other than the genetics, but as they should be there, we keep looking.
It's good practice. We don't frequently have genetic data with fossils, and by finding the patterns in modern animals that we have entire skeletons for, we can look for the same patterns in the partial skeletons of fossilized ones.
We can put numbers to those similarities and differences, and then a computer can calculate their "closeness."
Pretty soon our little tree sprouts branches and offers information. This allows us to make guess about behavior, find patterns in function of different structures, and hypothesize about the parts of animals that don't fossilize. In modern animals, we use it to design experiments, depending on whether we need very similar or very different animals. Its one more method towards being able to tell a more complete story.
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