Go ahead and punch me in the face for being such a dweeb, but
seeing Terrence Mallick’s Tree of Life really did have a fairly
profound effect on my relationship with Mother Nature. It was
apparent pretty much from the moment I walked out of the
theater; something about the director’s vision just put me a bit
more in tune with the natural world--especially, for some
reason, birds. It’s kind of like the arrow in the FedEx logo:
Once you start paying attention to birds, you can’t stop seeing
them. But unlike the shipping company’s satisfying but
straightforward visual gag, birds reward your attention over
time with their incredible diversity. This graphic shows how all
those dazzling species came to be. The chart was created in
conjunction with a groundbreaking new paper outlining avian
evolution, published recently by an international team of
biologists in the journal Nature. Using fossil records and DNA
data, the group traced the speciation of all 9,993 species of
birds known to man in unprecedented detail. Es