L’origine de la population ibérique de la Pie bleue

The Azure-winged Magpie (Cyanopica cyanus) is a small corvid, which occurs in two widely separated areas in eastern Asia and Iberian Peninsula. This unusual geographical pattern has been interpreted in two different ways: (1) as the result of an introduction of birds in the Iberian peninsula, after the establishment of the first commercial sea routes between Europe and far eastern Asia in 1500s, and (2) as resulting from the extinction of the species in the areas in between Iberia and East Asia due to a vicariant event connected with climatic changes: the birds’ once-extensive range broke up and shriveled during the last glaciation, between 125,000 and 10,000 years ago. Among other things, the European birds are smaller and lack the Asian whitish tail tips. Many scientists in the glaciation camp pointed to these characteristics as hard evidence that such evolutionary change could never take place over the mere five centuries posited by the mariner camp.
In 2000, the University of London’s Joanne H. Cooper published a paper in the journal Ibis documenting the first fossil record of an Azure-winged Magpie in Europe. Two specimens turned up in caves on Gibraltar at late Pleistocene sites.
To confirm this natural origin, and to evaluate the phylogenetic placement of the genus Cyanopica within the Corvidae family, Pedro Miguel Guimarães et Cardia Lopes, from the Faculty of Sciences of Porto (Portugal), sequenced for a region including the mitochondrial DNA genes cytochrome b and ND5 from birds belonging to three Asian subspecies (C. c. pallescens, C. c.kansuensis, C. c. swinhoei) and the Iberian subspecies (C. c. cooki), and we present there the results of theur study.