Essay On Classification Of Birds

The vertebrate class Aves includes an extremely distinctive clade called the birds, estimated around 9000 species around the world. Although, birds descend from the era of dinosaurs, birds have developed unique specializations for flight. They have an exclusive "one-way" breathing system, can weigh from light to medium-heavy, yet contains strong hollow bones, comprises of dominant flight muscles, and most importantly, its feathers. Birds can very in sizes, it can be as small as the size of a thumb or as large as the size of a human being. It is believed that the evolution of birds was during the Mesozoic Era, from the dinosaurs or a near relative of dinosaurs. They have evolved from having teeth to now having toothless beaks. As time passed by, the early birds became extinct. There is a record of almost 9,721 extant and only just inexistent bird

This type of classification is known as taxonomy. Carl Linnaeus, was the one who created the system of classification of species. The first division of classification is into Kingdom. Birds are determined to be in Kingdom Animalia. Then, the kingdom has further subdivisions called Phylum, and birds are placed in Phylum Chordata i.e. animals with

The class Aves has 142 families. The name of the families are quiet easy to indicate as they end in a –dae. For instance, the order called Apodiformes is distributed into 2 families known as Apodidae and Hemiprocnidae. Also, there are Genus within the families. Class Aves consists of 2,057 of them. Moreover, the next step of bird classification is species. This is the smallest unit in bird classification. There are few cases in which the species are further classified into subspecies to separate them according to their geographical area. It is recorded that there are 9,702 species of birds in the