Jake brings home the NAOC talks: Grad student Jake Berv was the closer in our long series of presentations at the NAOC meeting that ended yesterday. Talking in the very last session of the conference, Jake presented on his deep-time comparisons of diversification patterns in the avian Tree-of-Life, and on the effects that the K-T mass extinction event have had not only on the diversity we see today, but also on our ability to reconstruct patterns of diversity across time. This is a project that he has been working on intensively for much of the past year, and it has the potential to dramatically change our understanding of how modern bird diversity originated.
