Since T&T is sometimes referred to as the Land of the Hummingbird and they are featured on our coat of arms, I thought this was an appropriate topic for the forum.
Reuters, By Will Dunham, WASHINGTON Thu Apr 3, 2014 2:05pm EDT
(Reuters) - For such small creatures, hummingbirds certainly have racked up an outsized list of unique claims to fame.
They are the smallest birds and the smallest warm-blooded animals on Earth. They have the fastest heart and the fastest metabolism of any vertebrate. They are the only birds that can fly backward. And scientists reported on Thursday that they also have a complicated evolutionary history.
Researchers constructed the family tree of these nectar-eating birds using genetic information from most of the world's 338 hummingbird species and their closest relatives. They said hummingbirds can be divided into nine groups, with differences in size, habitat, feeding strategy and body shape.
The common ancestor to all species in existence today lived about 22 million years ago in South America, several million years after hummingbirds were known to be flourishing in Europe, they said. Today's hummingbirds are found only in the Americas.
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