Poultry are domesticated birds kept by humans for the purpose of harvesting animal products such as meat, eggs or feathers. The practice of raising poultry is known as poultry farming. These birds are most typically members of the superorder Galloanserae (fowl), especially the order Galliformes. The term also includes waterfowls of the family Anatidae but does not include wild birds hunted for food known as game or quarry.
Galliformes is an order of heavy-bodied ground-feeding birds that includes turkeys, chickens, quail, and other landfowl. Gallinaceous birds, as they are called, are important in their ecosystems as seed dispersers and predators, and are often reared by humans for their meat and eggs, or hunted as game birds.
The Anatidae are the biological family of water birds that includes ducks, geese, and swans. The family has a cosmopolitan distribution, occurring on all the world's continents except Antarctica. These birds are adapted for swimming, floating on the water surface, and in some cases diving in at least shallow water. The family contains around 174 species in 43 genera.
Anseriformes is an order of birds also known as waterfowl that comprises about 180 living species of birds in three families: Anhimidae, Anseranatidae, and Anatidae, the largest family, which includes over 170 species of waterfowl, among them the ducks, geese, and swans. Most modern species in the order are highly adapted for an aquatic existence at the water surface. With the exception of screamers, males have penises, a trait that has been lost in the Neoaves. Due to their aquatic nature, most species are web-footed.
The Sibley–Ahlquist taxonomy is a bird taxonomy proposed by Charles Sibley and Jon E. Ahlquist. It is based on DNA–DNA hybridization studies conducted in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s.
The Phasianidae are a family of heavy, ground-living birds, which includes pheasants, partridges, junglefowl, chickens, turkeys, Old World quail, and peafowl. The family includes many of the most popular gamebirds. The family is a large one and includes 185 species divided into 54 genera. It was formerly broken up into two subfamilies, the Phasianinae and the Perdicinae. However, this treatment is now known to be paraphyletic and polyphyletic, respectively, and more recent evidence supports breaking it up into two subfamilies: Rollulinae and Phasianinae, with the latter containing multiple tribes within two clades. The New World quail (Odontophoridae) and guineafowl (Numididae) were formerly sometimes included in this family, but are now typically placed in families of their own; conversely, grouse and turkeys, formerly often treated as distinct families, are now known to be deeply nested within Phasianidae, so they are now included in the present family.
Buttonquail or hemipodes are members of a small family of birds, Turnicidae, which resemble, but are not closely related to, the quails of Phasianidae. They inhabit warm grasslands in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Australia. There are 18 species in two genera, with most species placed in the genus Turnix and a single species in the genus Ortyxelos.
The term perching ducks is used colloquially to mean any species of ducks distinguished by their readiness to perch high in trees.
Anas is a genus of dabbling ducks. It includes the pintails, most teals, and the mallard and its close relatives. It formerly included additional species but following the publication of a molecular phylogenetic study in 2009 the genus was split into four separate genera. The genus now contains 31 living species. The name Anas is the Latin for "duck".
The whistling ducks or tree ducks are a subfamily, Dendrocygninae, of the duck, goose and swan family of birds, Anatidae. In other taxonomic schemes, they are considered a separate family, Dendrocygnidae. Some taxonomists list only one genus, Dendrocygna, which contains eight living species, and one undescribed extinct species from Aitutaki of the Cook Islands, but other taxonomists also list the white-backed duck under the subfamily.
Neognathae is an infraclass of birds, called neognaths, within the class Aves of the clade Archosauria. Neognathae includes the majority of living birds; the exceptions being the tinamous and the flightless ratites, which belong instead to the sister taxon Palaeognathae. There are nearly 10,000 living species of neognaths.
The evolution of birds began in the Jurassic Period, with the earliest birds derived from a clade of theropod dinosaurs named Paraves. Birds are categorized as a biological class, Aves. For more than a century, the small theropod dinosaur Archaeopteryx lithographica from the Late Jurassic period was considered to have been the earliest bird. Modern phylogenies place birds in the dinosaur clade Theropoda. According to the current consensus, Aves and a sister group, the order Crocodilia, together are the sole living members of an unranked reptile clade, the Archosauria. Four distinct lineages of bird survived the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago, giving rise to ostriches and relatives (Palaeognathae), waterfowl (Anseriformes), ground-living fowl (Galliformes), and "modern birds" (Neoaves).
Presbyornithidae is an extinct group of birds with a global distribution. They had evolved by the late Cretaceous period and became extinct during the early Miocene. Initially, they were believed to present a mix of characters shown by waterbirds, shorebirds and flamingos and were used to argue for an evolutionary relationship between these groups, but they are now generally accepted to be waterfowl closely related to modern ducks, geese, and screamers.
Fowl are birds belonging the biological orders Galliformes or Anseriformes (waterfowl).
John Alan Feduccia is a paleornithologist specializing in the origins and phylogeny of birds. He is S. K. Heninger Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina. Feduccia's authored works include three major books, The Age of Birds, The Origin and Evolution of Birds, Riddle of the Feathered Dragons,.
Gallornis is a genus of prehistoric birds from the Cretaceous. The single known species Gallornis straeleni lived near today's Auxerre in Yonne département (France); it has been dated very tentatively to the Berriasian-Hauterivian stages, that is about 140–130 million years ago. The known fossil material consists of a worn partial femur and a fragment of the humerus.
Gastornithiformes were an extinct order of giant flightless fowl with fossils found in North America, Eurasia, possibly Australia. Members of Gastornithidae were long considered to be a part of the order Gruiformes. However, the traditional concept of Gruiformes has since been shown to be polyphyletic.
Bradley Curtis Livezey was an American ornithologist with scores of publications. His main research included the evolution of flightless birds, the systematics of birds, and the ecology and behaviour of steamer ducks.
Vegaviidae is an extinct family of ornithurines, often regarded as stem-anseriforms, which existed during the Late Cretaceous and possibly the Paleocene. Fossils attributed to the family have been found in Canada, Chile, New Zealand, and Antarctica.
Asteriornis is an extinct genus of bird from the Late Cretaceous of Belgium which is known from a single species, Asteriornis maastrichtensis. It was closely related to birds of the extant superorder Galloanserae such as chickens and ducks. Members of the genus were small, long-legged birds that lived near the coastline and co-existed with more "primitive" types of birds such as Ichthyornis. Asteriornis is one of the oldest-known birds irrefutably belonging to the group Neornithes, which encompasses all modern birds. It possesses characteristics of both galliformes and anseriformes, indicating its position as a close relative of the last common ancestor for both groups.
