Data from: Building the avian tree of life using a large-scale, sparse supermatrix

Birds are the most diverse tetrapod class, with about 10,000 extant
species that represent a remarkable evolutionary radiation in which most
taxa arose during a short period of time. There has been a tremendous
increase in the amount of molecular data available from birds, and more
than two-thirds of these species have some sequence data available. Here
we assembled these available sequence data from birds to estimate a
large-scale avian phylogeny. We performed an unconstrained maximum
likelihood analysis of a sparse supermatrix comprising 22 nuclear loci and
seven mitochondrial regions from 6714 species. We inferred a phylogeny
with a backbone remarkably similar to that obtained by detailed analyses
of multigene datasets, yet with the addition of thousands of more taxa.
All orders were monophyletic with generally high support. While most
families and genera were well supported, a number of them, especially
within the oscine passerines, had little or no support. This likely
reflects problems with the circumscription of these genera and families.
Our results indicate that the amount of sequence data currently available
is sufficient to produce a robust estimate of the avian tree of life using
current methods of inference. The availability of a tree that is
unconstrained by prior information, with branch lengths that have a direct
connection to the underlying data, should be useful for comparative
methods, taxonomic revisions, and prioritizing taxa that should be
targeted for additional data collection.