“With chicks that have claws on their wings and a digestive system that resembles a cow’s, the pheasantsized hoatzin that roams the Amazon has always puzzled those trying to place it within the avian family tree. But now researchers believe they have pinned down the odd bird’s relatives—just one of the many findings revealed this week from a massive international project analyzing the sequenced genomes of 48 bird species representing nearly every order of bird. The fruits of this effort—eight papers this week in Science and more than 20 additional reports in several other journals—represent the biggest advance in avian biology in decades. ‘This has not been done for any other organism before,’ says Per Ericson, an evolutionary biologist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm. ‘It’s mind-blowing.'” View more …