Evolutionary geneticist Tom Gilbert was sipping a coffee in Madrid five years ago when an idea hit him - literally. "A pigeon crapped on me," he says, "and I thought to myself, 'Huh, pigeons'" On 11 December, Gilbert, of the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, and dozens of his colleagues reported an evolutionary analysis of the genomes of 48 bird species (including pigeons), amounting to the most comprehensive genome study of any major branch of the tree of life. The results confirm a 'big bang' in bird diversity after dinosaurs went extinct, and settle long-standing questions on how different birds are related to each other.
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