Ancient bird routes mapped via plant diversity

It's not what they intended to do or expected to find. They're not even all that interested in birds. When Andre Naranjo and his colleagues began work on a new study published in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, they wanted to know why a small mountain chain on the island of Hispaniola had more plant diversity than just about any other spot in the Caribbean. As far as they were concerned, the island's birds were merely an unnecessarily complicated form of seed dispersal.