In the face of a massive extinction crisis

In the face of a massive extinction crisis, conservation biologists have made all sorts of lists -- a sort of who’s who of endangered, threatened, and

vulnerable snakes, bugs, birds, and mammals that could wink out of existence as their habitat vanishes or their traditional food becomes scarce.

But which species should be at the top of the priority list for saving, and which last? Should they be ordered by scarcity, by economic importance, or even

by cuteness?

In a paper published in the journal Current Biology on Thursday, a team led by a Yale University ecologist has used a new measure to rank birds: which ones

hold the greatest evolutionary information. The researchers have calculated the “evolutionary distinctness” of 9,993 bird species, identifying those birds

that are so far out on the branching tree of life that to lose them would be to lose millions of years of nature’s work. Then, they factored in the

geographical range of the birds, identifying those species that pack the most evolutionary history per acre -- such that preserving even a relatively small

patch of land could have a big impact.

“If one [of these species] was to go, we would have lost 60 or 70 million years of evolutionary history or information,” said Walter Jetz, associate

professor in ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale. “You can’t inundate the public or decision-makers with 10,000 species; you have to give them

something easier to work with. And not all the species here are fluffy or cute -- it does give you something tangible: that lonely branch, that distinctness

attribute, that people can connect with that much more easily.”

People have long talked about using evolutionary distinctness as a measure for guiding conservation strategy, but what made it possible to rank thousands of

birds was a detailed branching tree of bird evolution that researchers drafted two years ago. Michael Reed, a biologist at Tufts University who was not

involved in the research, recalled that when that was first presented: “The bird people in the audience were all excited to find out what the weirdest brids

were.”