Bird neck length correlated to leg length

Böhmer, et al. 2019 report,
“In contrast with mammals, the length of the cervical vertebral column increases as body size increases and, thus, body size does not constrain neck length in birds. Indeed, neck length scales isometrically with total leg length suggesting a correlated evolution between both modules.”

Unfortunately,
Böhmer et al. employed an invalid cladogram (Hackett et al. 2008) based on genes, not traits. So their cladogram wrongly nests flamingoes with grebes, for instance.

We learned earlier
that basal birds, no matter their size, had relatively long neck and legs (Fig. 2) in the LRT, a trait-based analysis. Small birds with shorter legs and necks are derived neotonous clades, retaining chick dimensions and proportions into adulthood. That happened over and over and over again in the large reptile tree (LRT, 1470 taxa, subset Fig. 2).

We looked at
this cladogram of bird leg length (Fig. 2) a year ago here.

References
Böhmer C, Plateau O, Cornette R and Abourachid A 2019. Correlated evolution of neck length and leg length in birds. Royal Society open science 6: 181588. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.181588
Hackett SJ et al. 2008. A phylogenomic study of birds reveals their evolutionary history. Science 320, 1763–1768. (doi:10.1126/science. 1157704)