The Bizarre Bird That’s Breaking the Tree of Life

When Josefin Stiller was growing up in Berlin, she loved reading about Greek gods in an encyclopedia of mythology. She often lost track of their relationships, however—their feuds, trysts, and betrayals—as she flipped among the entries. Frustrated, she wrote each name on a card and started to arrange children beneath parents on a desk in her bedroom. As lineages became clear, so did family dramas. Sons killed fathers; uncles kidnapped nieces; siblings fell in love. “I wonder if this experience of reconstructing a family tree primed me to appreciate trees and the powerful insights they hold,” Stiller told me in a recent e-mail.

Years later, as a graduate student in biology, Stiller worked on an evolutionary tree for seahorses and their relatives, using DNA to understand the ancestry of different species. Then, in 2017, she moved to the University of Copenhagen and joined B10K, a scientific collaboration that aims to sequence the genome of every bird species—more than ten thousand in all—and to reveal their connections in a comprehensive tree. The amount of data and computing power required for this mission is almost unfathomable, but the final product should be as simple in principle as the diagram Stiller had assembled as a child. “Everything in biology has a history, and we can show this history as a bifurcating tree,” she said.

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