Chicken birds
| Chicken birds | ||||||||||||
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Male Pheasant ( Phasianus colchicus ) |
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| Galliformes | ||||||||||||
| Temminck , 1820 |
The order of the chickens (Galliformes) comprises five families with about 70 genera and more than 250 species. As the most important family, the pheasant-like are distributed almost worldwide and represent the majority of the species. Of the other families, the toothed quail live in North and South America, the Hokkohhner in Central and South America, the guinea fowl in Africa and the big foot fowl in Australia, New Guinea and Indonesia east of the Wallace line .
Chicken birds have populated a wide variety of habitats. These include temperate coniferous and deciduous forests, rainforests, cultivated land , steppes , deserts , high mountains and the tundra . Many chickens live on the ground and rarely fly, others mostly in trees. Some species of chicken have been domesticated and are of great importance as egg and meat suppliers for humans. The most important are the Asian bankiva chicken - the ancestral form of the domestic chicken - and the turkey , both from the pheasant-like family.
features
Chicken birds mostly have large bodies and mostly, as short-range fliers, relatively short wings. They reach a weight of 70 g to 9.5 kg, depending on the species. The plumage color ranges from a gray-brown camouflage plumage to a very conspicuous, colorful plumage. The length of the tail varies widely. It can almost not be present, but it can also reach lengths of up to one meter ( peacock ). Many chicken birds have pronounced sexual dimorphism . Usually the males are more conspicuously colored, have longer tails and a head decorated with bare, colored skin flaps and colorful feathers.
Systematics
Within the class of birds , the goose birds (Anseriformes) are probably the closest relatives of the chicken birds. The taxon formed by both orders is called Galloanserae and has been supported by many phylogenetic studies.
The chickens belong to five families, shown here in a cladogram to show their relationships:
| Chicken birds |
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There is also the extinct family Sylviornithidae with the only species Sylviornis neocaledoniae .
Web links
- L. Howard: Galliformes (On-line), Animal Diversity Web. 2004 , accessed September 1, 2009
Individual evidence
- ↑ Hackett et al .: A Phylogenomic Study of Birds Reveals Their Evolutionary History . Science 27 June 2008: Vol. 320. no. 5884, pp. 1763–1768 doi : 10.1126 / science.1157704
- ^ Matthew G. Houde: Parallel Radiations in the Primary Clades of Birds. Evolution, Volume 58 Issue 11, Pages 2558 - 2573, May 2007 doi : 10.1111 / j.0014-3820.2004.tb00884.x
- ↑ Per GP Ericson et al .: Diversification of Neoaves: integration of molecular sequence data and fossils . Biol. Lett., 2006, doi : 10.1098 / rsbl.2006.0523 .
- ^ Tree of Life Web Project. 2007. Galliformes. Fowl, Quail, Guans, Currasows, Megapodes. Version 07 March 2007. http://tolweb.org/Galliformes/26296/2007.03.07