UsefulCharts’ Bird Family Tree Has a Problem: The Science Isn't Settled
Matt Baker promises viewers a bird family tree based on the latest evolutionary research. What he delivers is a confident map of relationships that scientists are still disputing, alongside an obsolete classification and several factual mistakes that published research could have helped him avoid.
There is something appealing about reducing millions of years of evolution to a single poster. The branches look orderly. Every bird has a place. The complicated history of life becomes something anyone can understand.
That is what Matt Baker offers in Family Tree of Birds Version 1.0, presented on his UsefulCharts YouTube channel.
He begins with dinosaurs and moves through the evolutionary relationships of flamingos, pigeons, penguins, falcons, parrots, crows, and thousands of other birds. He explains how genetic research has overturned familiar assumptions, including the surprising discovery that falcons are more closely related to parrots than to hawks.
Much of that account is consistent with modern evolutionary biology.
But Baker's central promise deserves scrutiny. He is not simply introducing birds. He is explaining how they are classified according to the latest research.
That makes the scientific foundations of his chart the most important part of the product.
And those foundations are considerably less settled than his presentation allows viewers to understand.
The Four-Branch Family Tree Is a Scientific Hypothesis, Not a Final Verdict
Baker identifies 2024 as a turning point in understanding the evolution of modern birds.
He explains that Neoaves, the enormous group containing approximately 95% of living bird species, can now be divided into four major branches: Mirandornithes, Columbaves, Elementaves, and Telluraves.
This classification comes from genuine scientific research.
A major study published in Nature on April 1, 2024, examined the genomes of 363 bird species representing 218 taxonomic families—approximately 92% of recognized bird families.
Led by Josefin Stiller, the researchers reconstructed evolutionary relationships using large quantities of genomic data.
Their analysis produced the four major Neoaves groups Baker describes.
But there is an important difference between explaining what a major study found and presenting its proposed classification as the new arrangement of the bird family tree.
The researchers themselves emphasized continuing disagreement.
Different parts of the genome produced conflicting evolutionary signals. Some relationships remained difficult to resolve even with extensive genetic information.
Most importantly, the newly named Elementaves group did not receive consistent support across the analytical approaches.
It was recovered in certain analyses using DNA regions between genes and ultraconserved elements. Other approaches, including some using protein-coding regions, produced different relationships.
The paper explicitly identified several branches whose positions remained uncertain.
Baker introduces the new classification with a modest qualification: it is now thought that Neoaves can be divided into these four groups.
That qualification is better than claiming absolute certainty.
It is also insufficient to explain the actual scientific dispute.
A viewer could reasonably leave believing that researchers had finally established the four great branches of modern birds. The underlying paper tells a more complicated story.
Another 2024 Study Reached a Different Conclusion
The problem becomes clearer when Baker's chosen framework is compared with another substantial investigation published the same year.
On February 12, 2024, a research team led by Shaoyuan Wu published a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Instead of 363 species, the researchers examined 124 species across the orders of Neoaves, using 25,460 genetic regions in their analyses.
They proposed a substantially different arrangement.
Their evolutionary tree divided Neoaves into two major groups: Telluraves and a newly defined Aquaterraves.
Their reconstruction of evolutionary timing also differed from the later Nature study.
Wu's team argued that modern birds diversified more steadily through the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction boundary, whereas Stiller's analysis supported substantial diversification around and after that event.
These were not merely disagreements over scientific terminology.
They concerned the relationships between major bird groups and the timing of evolutionary events that shaped today's biodiversity.
The competing research also attracted serious methodological criticism.
In July 2024, researchers Mark Springer and John Gatesy challenged Wu's analysis, identifying problems involving genetic sequence alignments and the identification of corresponding DNA regions.
Reanalyzing the data using another method, they did not recover support for the proposed Aquaterraves grouping.
Wu and his colleagues disputed those objections, arguing that the identified problems had little effect on their conclusions.
That exchange does not establish that the two proposed trees deserve equal confidence. Nor does it invalidate Stiller's four-clade hypothesis.
It establishes something Baker's presentation does not adequately convey: the evolutionary structure of modern birds remains an active scientific problem, with competing analyses and contested methods.
A diagram that presents one reconstruction without identifying its important unresolved branches risks turning a scientific hypothesis into an apparent fact.
For a poster intended to explain evolutionary relationships, that distinction matters.
The Songbird Classification Includes a Group Scientists Had Already Rejected
The dispute over the 2024 classification might be understandable. Scientific knowledge changes, and researchers reasonably disagree about difficult questions.
Another problem in Baker's presentation is harder to excuse.
When discussing songbirds, he says the Passeri suborder divides into two principal groups: Passerida and Corvida.
He then introduces corvids, including crows, ravens, jays, and magpies, as members of the latter grouping.
The classification has a history.
In 1990, ornithologists Charles Sibley and Jon Ahlquist proposed dividing songbirds into Passerida and Corvida using DNA–DNA hybridization evidence.
Later genetic research undermined that arrangement.
A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2004 explained that the original Corvida did not constitute a natural evolutionary group containing all descendants of a single shared ancestor.
Instead, Passerida was nested among lineages previously assigned to Corvida.
Scientists describe such an arrangement as paraphyletic.
The researchers identified a more restricted group of crow-like songbirds, called core Corvoidea, while recognizing a more complicated set of relationships among other songbird lineages.
By 2015, a genomic study published in Genome Biology and Evolution explicitly described Corvida as a classification that had largely been superseded.
Yet Baker uses the old division in a presentation explaining the latest evolutionary research.
This is not a disagreement arising from the 2024 studies.
It is a classification problem documented more than two decades earlier.
The distinction is particularly important because Baker spends considerable time explaining that appearances and familiar names can conceal evolutionary relationships.
He correctly explains that European and American robins belong to different families and that falcons are not close relatives of hawks.
Those examples illustrate why genetic evidence matters.
But the same principle should apply to the framework organizing the songbirds themselves.
A modern classification cannot selectively embrace genetic revisions while retaining an outdated grouping without explanation.
Flightless Birds Tell a More Complicated Evolutionary Story
Baker introduces Paleognathae as a group containing familiar flightless birds, including ostriches, rheas, emus, and kiwis.
He explains that most members have lost the ability to fly.
That statement is accurate as far as it goes.
What the presentation leaves out is one of the most important discoveries about their evolutionary history.
Flightlessness did not simply originate once in a common ancestor of all these birds.
Researchers have established that the paleognath lineage also includes tinamous, birds from Central and South America that retain the ability to fly.
Their evolutionary position changes how scientists understand the origins of ostriches, emus, rheas, and other flightless birds.
A 2008 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzed 20 nuclear genes and found evidence placing flying tinamous within the broader evolutionary grouping traditionally associated with flightless ratites.
The results indicated that flight was probably lost independently at least three times.
A subsequent developmental study, published in 2017, strengthened that interpretation by comparing the embryonic wing development of ostriches, emus, tinamous, and chickens.
Ostrich and emu wings followed different developmental patterns, consistent with separate evolutionary routes to flightlessness.
That changes the story substantially.
A reader might imagine that ostriches, emus, and kiwis inherited flightlessness from one ancient flightless ancestor.
The research instead reveals repeated evolutionary changes in different lineages.
Similar outcomes emerged through distinct evolutionary histories.
Baker discusses the loss of flight in several birds, including penguins and the dodo. Yet his treatment of Paleognathae leaves out the very evidence that makes their flightlessness scientifically revealing.
This is an omission rather than a false statement.
But it is an important omission in a presentation whose purpose is explaining evolutionary history.
The Nine-Feather Explanation Fails a Physical Examination
Near the end of the video, Baker introduces the New World nine-primaried oscines.
These include familiar American songbirds such as cardinals, orioles, warblers, and sparrows.
He explains that the name refers to birds having only nine main wing feathers, compared with the ten usually found in other birds.
He even compares the arrangement to humans having ten fingers.
It is an accessible explanation.
It also leaves viewers with the wrong anatomical impression.
The term nine-primaried is historical. It refers to birds that typically possess nine readily visible or functional primary flight feathers.
But that does not mean they necessarily lack a tenth primary.
In 2005, ornithologist K. Susanna S. Hall published an investigation in the Journal of Ornithology examining the actual anatomy behind the terminology.
Hall studied 161 specimens representing 104 bird species.
All the examined species possessed ten primary feathers.
Among the supposedly nine-primaried birds, the tenth feather was reduced and largely concealed beneath another feather.
Hall concluded that the traditional name had limited systematic value and could be misleading when treated as a literal count.
Baker's description of nine main feathers can be defended if main means well-developed or functional.
But the comparison with human fingers strongly encourages the simpler interpretation that one feather is absent.
The published anatomical research provides a more precise explanation.
These birds generally have ten primaries, but the outermost one is greatly reduced.
That is not a difficult distinction to explain.
It is precisely the kind of distinction an educational chart should preserve.
The Canary Was Warning Miners About the Wrong Gas
One of the clearest factual errors appears in a brief discussion of canaries.
Baker explains that these birds became popular pets and were later used in American coal mines.
He says they were sent underground to detect carbon dioxide.
The historically important danger was carbon monoxide.
Carbon monoxide is an odorless, poisonous gas that can accumulate in mines and seriously harm workers.
Canaries were particularly sensitive to it and could display signs of poisoning before humans experienced dangerous symptoms.
The Science Museum Group in Britain preserves a historical canary revival cage equipped with an oxygen cylinder.
Its accompanying historical account explains how physiologist John Haldane investigated a mining disaster in 1896 and subsequently advocated using sensitive animals to detect carbon monoxide.
The museum also documents how miners could attempt to revive affected birds using oxygen.
Carbon dioxide can also present hazards in mines. But the famous historical role of the canary was as an early warning for carbon monoxide and other dangerous gases, not specifically the carbon dioxide detection Baker describes.
Confusing the two substances changes the factual explanation.
Carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide have different chemical properties, physiological effects, and safety implications.
This mistake does not invalidate the bird family tree.
It does demonstrate the hazards of explaining science through memorable details without checking the underlying facts.
Crows Are Intelligent. That Does Not Give Them the Intelligence of a Seven-Year-Old Child
Baker also makes a striking claim about corvid intelligence.
He describes corvids as the smartest birds on the planet, with intelligence roughly equivalent to that of a seven-year-old child.
The statement sounds scientific because it provides a familiar benchmark.
But what exactly does it measure?
The relevant research is considerably narrower.
In 2014, scientists studied New Caledonian crows using experiments inspired by Aesop's fable of a crow dropping stones into water.
The birds had to manipulate objects to raise water levels and reach food.
They succeeded in several tests, distinguishing between sinking and floating objects and between solid and hollow objects.
Their performance on particular problems resembled that of children aged five to seven.
But the crows failed other tasks, including experiments requiring them to account for differences in tube width and counterintuitive causal relationships.
The researchers therefore described the birds' understanding as sophisticated but incomplete.
That is a remarkable finding.
It is not evidence that every species of crow, raven, magpie, or jay possesses the general intelligence of a seven-year-old human.
Nor does performance on selected physical reasoning tasks establish an overall intelligence ranking covering every bird species.
Baker turns a specific experimental comparison into a broad statement about an entire family of birds.
The difference matters because cognition is not a single ability that can be reduced to a human age.
Tool use, memory, social reasoning, communication, and physical problem-solving can develop differently across species.
The more accurate finding is already impressive: certain corvids can solve particular problems at a level comparable to young children.
There is no need to exaggerate it.
Even the Geographic Names Can Suggest More Certainty Than They Establish
Baker explains the division of Telluraves into Afroaves and Australaves by saying that the former evolved on what became Africa and the latter on what became South America and Australia.
The names have genuine scientific origins.
Afroaves was named partly for an inferred African origin, while Australaves derives from the Latin word for southern.
But evolutionary group names do not, by themselves, establish where every ancestral lineage evolved.
A 2022 scientific treatment of higher-level bird clades describes the definitions and evolutionary evidence underlying these groups.
It also records disagreements about relationships within Afroaves.
For Australaves, the formal definition identifies shared evolutionary ancestry among lineages containing seriemas, falcons, parrots, and passerines. It does not establish a simple, settled geographic origin involving both South America and Australia.
Reconstructing ancient geographic origins requires evidence about fossil distributions, continental history, evolutionary timing, and ancestral populations.
A geographic label cannot replace that investigation.
Baker's explanation is understandable as a short introduction. But it risks making ancient evolutionary movements appear more certain than the evidence establishes.
A Working Draft Is Not an Excuse to Hide the Unfinished Science
There is an important qualification in Baker's presentation.
He tells viewers that the chart is a working copy, not the final product.
He specifically invites corrections and suggestions before printing.
That matters. The available evidence does not support accusing him of knowingly publishing false information or deliberately concealing scientific disagreements.
It would be unreasonable to treat every taxonomic choice as an error simply because researchers have not resolved every branch.
Evolutionary classifications must be updated as evidence improves, and an educational poster inevitably simplifies complicated relationships.
The question is where simplification becomes distortion.
Baker's project is also commercial.
UsefulCharts is promoting a Kickstarter campaign for an expanded series of evolutionary posters. Viewers are encouraged to preorder individual charts or the complete collection.
The transcript establishes that financial connection openly.
It does not establish that commercial interests influenced any particular scientific claim.
Nevertheless, a poster sold as a reference to evolutionary history carries an obvious responsibility: readers should be able to distinguish well-established relationships from provisional reconstructions.
The solution does not require abandoning the chart.
Uncertain branches could be marked. Major alternative hypotheses could be acknowledged. An obsolete classification could be replaced. Confirmed factual mistakes could be corrected.
These are ordinary editorial safeguards.
Their absence is consequential because the finished poster will communicate through visual authority.
A line connecting two branches rarely announces how much statistical disagreement lies behind it.
A label rarely reveals that its meaning has changed over decades of research.
The cleaner the image, the easier it becomes to mistake clarity for certainty.
The Verdict: The Tree Needs More Than New Branches
Matt Baker is right about the fundamental evolutionary story.
Birds are living dinosaurs. Modern genetic research has overturned classifications based on superficial resemblance. Falcons and parrots share a closer evolutionary relationship than falcons and hawks. The immense diversity of songbirds is one of evolution's extraordinary achievements.
Those are not the claims that fail scrutiny.
The weaknesses emerge when the presentation moves from established discoveries into unresolved relationships, outdated classifications, and memorable factual explanations that do not withstand checking.
The four-clade arrangement of Neoaves reflects substantial 2024 research, but important parts remain disputed.
The Passerida–Corvida division preserves a classification that genetic research undermined decades ago.
The account of flightless paleognaths omits evidence for repeated independent losses of flight.
The nine-primary explanation obscures a reduced tenth feather.
The mining canary is associated with the wrong gas.
And the impressive cognition of certain crows becomes an unsupported age-equivalence claim about corvids generally.
These problems do not make UsefulCharts worthless.
They make its presentation of scientific authority less reliable than it appears.
Evolutionary science is valuable precisely because its conclusions can be tested and revised. New evidence can redraw branches, overturn assumptions, and expose mistakes in classifications that once seemed natural.
An educational family tree should communicate that intellectual discipline.
Instead, Baker's chart makes the complicated process of scientific discovery look too much like a finished arrangement.
The problem is not that the bird family tree continues to change. The problem is presenting its changing branches with more certainty than the evidence deserves.
References
1. Original work — Family Tree of Birds Version 1.0. UsefulCharts, Matt Baker; publication date not independently established.
Watch the original video
The work under examination; establishes Baker's explanations, terminology, commercial context, and invitation for corrections.
2. Stiller, Josefin, et al. — Complexity of Avian Evolution Revealed by Family-Level Genomes. Nature, April 1, 2024.
Read the scientific paper
Establishes the genomic foundation of the four-clade Neoaves hypothesis, while documenting conflicting genetic signals and unresolved evolutionary relationships.
3. Wu, Shaoyuan, et al. — Genomes, Fossils, and the Concurrent Rise of Modern Birds and Flowering Plants in the Late Cretaceous. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, February 12, 2024.
Read the alternative phylogenetic study
Presents a competing evolutionary reconstruction involving Aquaterraves and different conclusions about the timing of modern bird diversification.
4. Springer, Mark S., and John Gatesy — A New Phylogeny for Aves Is Compromised by Pervasive Misalignment and Homology Problems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 8, 2024.
Read the methodological criticism
Challenges Wu's evolutionary reconstruction through reanalysis and identification of potential genetic-data errors.
5. Wu, Shaoyuan, et al. — Reply to Springer and Gatesy: The Impact of Long Branches and Misalignments on Phylogenetic Analysis Is Minimal. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 8, 2024.
Read the researchers' response
Provides the original authors' rebuttal, demonstrating that the methodological criticisms remain contested rather than conclusively resolving the competing phylogenies.
6. Barker, F. Keith, et al. — Phylogeny and Diversification of the Largest Avian Radiation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2004.
Read the songbird classification research
Documents why the historical Corvida–Passerida division fails to represent the actual evolutionary relationships of songbirds.
7. New Zealand Passerines Help Clarify the Diversification of Major Songbird Lineages during the Oligocene. Genome Biology and Evolution, 2015.
Read the genomic study
Explains that Corvida had largely been superseded as a classification, providing further evidence that Baker's terminology is outdated.
8. Harshman, John, et al. — Phylogenomic Evidence for Multiple Losses of Flight in Ratite Birds. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2008.
Read the evolutionary study
Establishes genetic evidence that flightlessness evolved independently in multiple paleognath lineages.
9. Distinct Developmental Pathways Underlie Independent Losses of Flight in Ratites. Royal Society Open Science, 2017.
Read the developmental study
Provides embryological evidence for different evolutionary mechanisms of flight loss in ostriches and emus.
10. Hall, K. Susanna S. — Do Nine-Primaried Passerines Have Nine or Ten Primary Feathers? The Evolution of a Concept. Journal of Ornithology, 2005.
Read the anatomical investigation
Examines 161 bird specimens and establishes that supposedly nine-primaried species generally possess a reduced, concealed tenth primary.
11. Cage for Reviving Canary. Science Museum Group Collection, undated catalogue entry.
Examine the museum's historical evidence
Documents the use of canaries to detect carbon monoxide in mines and the historical development of animal-based gas detection.
12. Jelbert, Sarah A., et al. — Using the Aesop's Fable Paradigm to Investigate Causal Understanding of Water Displacement by New Caledonian Crows. PLOS ONE, March 26, 2014.
Read the cognitive experiments
Establishes the limited experimental basis for comparing specific crow reasoning abilities with those of children aged five to seven.
13. Phylogenetic Definitions for 25 Higher-Level Clade Names of Birds. Avian Research, 2022.
Read the taxonomic definitions
Documents the formal meanings, evolutionary compositions, and historical origins of clade names including Afroaves and Australaves.