So Warnow and other researchers came up with a new technique, published in one of the eight Science papers, called statistical binning. Her group used the usual methods to build species trees, and compared them to the method they'd developed. They found the new method led to significantly improved gene trees — and it can be used for other genetic data in the future.

Once the tree had been established, scientists found other things. For instance, birds had an explosive diversification of species right after the dinosaurs went extinct, says Erich Jarvis, a neurobiologist at Duke University and a co-author on several papers. All modern orders of birds formed within a 10 million to 15 million year period following that extinction event about 60 million years ago, he said. That was long after birds lost their teeth, about 116 million years ago, according to one of the Science papers.

Chickens and turkeys appear to be closer to dinosaurs than other birds are, having experienced fewer genomic changes, according to a paper published in BMC Genomics.

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