http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20035-lost-islands-of-the-crows-revealed-in-dna-study.html Knud Jønsson, now at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, set out to unravel the history of crows for his doctoral dissertation. By building a family tree of the world's corvids based on comparisons of DNA sequences and anatomy, and their present geographic distribution, he traced their origins to New Guinea, several hundred kilometres north of Australia, about 30 million years ago.