The Ascent of Birds: How Modern Science Is Revealing Their Story

If, like me, you are interested in both evolution and birds, then you will love this book. The author has put in an enormous amount of work in bringing together for us the results of the research on the family history of birds carried out by a large number of ornithologists.

The book is not about how birds evolved from dinosaurs. (If you want to know about that, I would recommend “Flying Dinosaurs” by John Pickrell.) Rather, this book deals with how birds have spread and diversified around the world over the millions of years since they first appeared.

The book is very up-to-date. Reilly shows that genetic research is adding to our knowledge of the family tree of birds all the time. For example, it is now known that hawks and falcons show more are not closely related, but that swifts and hummingbirds are.

For me, the most interesting parts of the book are those where Reilly uses examples from the evolution of birds to illustrate evolutionary concepts. For example we read about the importance of natural selection, sexual selection, speciation through geographical isolation, sympatric speciation, hybridisation, co-evolution, convergent evolution, adaptive radiation, and much, much more.

Finally, just two words of warning. Firstly, although the book is mainly written in such a way that interested non-specialists can understand it, there are a few parts which are quite difficult – such as the section on “quantum compasses”!

Secondly, I found that at times there was perhaps more information than I wanted on the details of where and when particular bird groups evolved. The book is VERY detailed. But that is not really a criticism, because no doubt many readers will be glad to get such detailed information. show less