Abstract
The analysis of evolutionary rates has received scant attention within ornithology. The primary reason would seem to be the nature of the avian fossil record: If an understanding of rates depends upon having a time dimension, which most paleontologists believe can only be extracted from fossil data, how can we hope to study rates using the notoriously poor record of birds? No one would deny that the avian record is less complete than other vertebrates or many groups of non vertebrates, yet this cannot be the entire story, for there are easily over a thousand paleospecies of birds known, some of which provide information about rates. Another contributing factor, probably, is our relatively poor knowledge of avian phylogenetic relationships. All assessments of rates, whether absolute or relative, depend upon some hypothesis about the phylogenetic relationships of the taxa being studied.
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Cracraft, J. (1984). Conceptual and Methodological Aspects of the Study of Evolutionary Rates, with some Comments on Bradytely in Birds. In: Eldredge, N., Stanley, S.M. (eds) Living Fossils. Casebooks in Earth Sciences. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-8271-3_10
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