A Comparative Karyotype Study in Fourteen Species of Birds

A karyological study of 55 species of birds, including karyotypes of 39 species new to cytology

“…The same morphology of the five pairs of macro-autosomes was found in Asio otus and flammeus Biederman, unpublished, see Shields, 1982), Otus scops (Itoh et al, 1969), O. asio and Glaucidium radiatum (Misra, 1974). Because of the presence of these five pairs in a variety of genera, their morphology may be ancestral to the Strigidae.…”

“…8) is nearly identical to the karyotypes of A. cinerea and A. purpurea (RayChaudhuri, 1976;Mori, 1968;Itoh et al, 1969;Hammar, 1970;Klein, 1973). The only possible exception is that the W of A. goliath is acrocentric instead of subtelocentric.…”

“…Three species of Rallidae studied cytologically, Fulica atra, Gallinula chloropus and Porphyrio poliocephalus (Hammar, 1970;Itoh et al, 1969) are characterized by the presence of a submetacentric pair 3, possibly derived from the subtelocentric pair 3 of the Gruidae by pericentric inversion. The former two species exhibit metacentric pairs 4 and 5 (submetacentric in the Gruidae), possibly also derived by pericentric inversions, and sex chromosomes similar to those of the gruids.…”

“…The former two species exhibit metacentric pairs 4 and 5 (submetacentric in the Gruidae), possibly also derived by pericentric inversions, and sex chromosomes similar to those of the gruids. The latter species, of which no definite female was studied (Itoh et al, 1969), possesses only two pairs of medium-sized biarmed (metacentric) chromosomes. Since one of these is likely to be the Z-chromosome pair, either pair 4 or pair 5 of the former two rallids seems to be absent, possibly due to fissioning.…”

Chromosomal evolution within the family Estrildidae (Aves) I. The Poephilae

“…Until the mid 1970's most cytogenetic studies of birds compared species from different families and orders (Hammar, 1966;Itoh et al, 1969;RayChaudhuri et al, 1969;Takagi & Sasaki, 1974). The general opinion at that time was that the avian karyotype was relatively uniform between groups and therefore stable through time.…”