Telluraves, also known as land birds or core landbirds, is a recently defined clade of birds defined by their arboreality. Based on most recent genetic studies, the clade unites a variety of bird groups, including the australavians (passerines, parrots, seriemas, and falcons) as well as the afroavians (including the Accipitrimorphae – eagles, hawks, buzzards, vultures etc. – owls and woodpeckers, among others). This grouping was defined in the PhyloCode by George Sangster and colleagues in 2022 as "the least inclusive crown clade containing Accipiter nisus and Passer domesticus". The
Telluraves, also known as land birds or core landbirds, is a recently defined clade of birds defined by their arboreality. Based on most recent genetic studies, the clade unites a variety of bird groups, including the australavians (passerines, parrots, seriemas, and falcons) as well as the afroavians (including the Accipitrimorphae – eagles, hawks, buzzards, vultures etc. – owls and woodpeckers, among others). This grouping was defined in the PhyloCode by George Sangster and colleagues in 2022 as "the least inclusive crown clade containing Accipiter nisus and Passer domesticus". They appear to be the sister group of the Phaethoquornithes.
Based on phylogenetic relationships among lineages of the Afroaves and the Australaves, it has been suggested that the last common ancestor of all Telluraves may have been an apex predator, and possibly also a bird of prey. Other researchers are skeptical of this assessment, citing the herbivorous cariamiform Strigogyps as evidence to the contrary.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).