American scavengers that can smell the dead
Cathartidae—New World vultures and condors—counts seven living species in five genera across the Americas. Unlike Old World vultures that hunt carcasses by eye alone, some Cathartes species smell their meals. Frédéric de Lafresnaye named the family group in 1839; taxonomy later flirted with stork kinship.
Genera include Coragyps, Cathartes, Gymnogyps, Sarcoramphus, and Vultur; only Cathartes holds more than one living species. All evolved to process carrion without the illness that would fell other birds. Traditional placement sat inside Falconiformes; late-twentieth-century karyotype arguments pushed some authors toward Ciconiiformes with storks.
The family splits into five living vultures and two living condors. The New World label exists to separate them from the Old World vultures, which look and behave alike but evolved separately. Sibley and Monroe went further in 1990, folding them into a broadened stork order.
Multi-locus DNA studies now show them related to the other birds of prey apart from the falcons. On that evidence many taxonomists, including the International Ornithological Committee, place them in Accipitriformes alongside hawks, eagles, Old World vultures, the osprey and the secretarybird, while the American Ornithological Society and some other authorities keep them in an order of their own, Cathartiformes. Their fossil history is tangled: many ancient birds have been tentatively assigned to the family, and there is no firm European fossil from the Neogene.
In the Pliocene and Pleistocene the family was far more varied, rivalling today's Old World vultures in body shapes, sizes and ways of life. Extinct forms include Diatropornis from the late Eocene or early Oligocene of France, Brasilogyps from Brazil, Hadrogyps from the middle Miocene of southwestern North America, Perugyps from Peru's Pisco Formation, and Dryornis from Argentina, which may belong in the modern condor genus Vultur. Breagyps lived in southwestern North America in the late Pleistocene, and a Gymnogyps species once lived on Cuba.
Source: New World vulture
