AI reveals perching birds evolved in climate-driven bursts, not steady change

In the basement archives of natural history museums, fifty million years of avian life have been waiting for the right instrument to read them. A team of researchers at the University of Michigan, wielding an AI tool called Skelevision, has now done so at unprecedented scale — measuring over 170,000 skeletal features across more than 2,000 species of perching birds to reveal that evolution does not flow like a river but erupts like a geyser, clustering into rare, powerful bursts timed to the planet's own climatic upheavals. The discovery, rooted in bones collected long before anyone imagined s