Trust New Scientist to have a 'snazzier' take on what taxonomy might or might not help explain.
The new scientist magasine has a story about how migrations to islands have been rethought after studies of rat genomes, how we must have lived with gorillas at one stage given that our crabs are too similiar, and how a chicken bone is becomine a 'bone of contention'.

As with all good science writing, some issues are highighted, namely the scientist's reservations about making claims based on just one sequence of a fossil bone. However I'm feeling the need to re-plunge into my taxonomy books to review what assumptions people are making about rate of change of DNA genomes... How similiar is enough to be sure?

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