Studies of the phylogenetic relationships of the Charadriiformes have been largely based on conservative morphological characters. During the past 10 years, many studies on the evolutionary biology of birds adopted phylogenetic information obtained from mitochondrial DNA, but few work on the Charadriiformes has been reported to date. Therefore, phylogenetic relationships and classification of the Charadriiformes remains controversial. In this study, we try to shed light on these relationships via DNA sequence analysis of the mitochondrial Cyt b gene in 12 species of Charadriiformes. It was a preliminary study of the origin and evolution of the species by using nucleotide sequence data. Using the well-known PCR techniques, the complete mitochondrial Cyt b gene sequences were amplified and sequenced respectively from Charadrius mongolus, Charadrius alexandrinus, Numenius madagascariensis, Numenius arquat, Numenius phaeopus, Tringa totanus, Tringa glareola, Xenus cineres, Arenaria interpres, Calidris tenuirostris, Recurvirostra avosetts and Haematopus ostralensis. The 1143 bp long DNA sequences of the gene from these species were obtained, in which 381 variable sites were identified without insertions or deletions. The nucleic acid sequence variation of the mitochondrial Cyt b gene was 5.16%-16.01% among these species. Phylogenetic trees constructed using the NJ method, MP method and ML method with Ciconia ciconia as the outgroup indicate that the 12 species of Charadriiformes examined in this study are clustered in two major clades. The first clade includes T. totanus, T. glareola, A. interpres, C. tenuirostris, X. cineres, N. madagascariensis, N. arquata and N. phaeopus. The second one includes C. mongolus, C. alexandrinus, R. avosetts and H. ostralensis. Our molecular data show that the phylogenetic relationships among species of Scolopacidae are consistent with the classification based on morphological studies; R. avosetts and H. ostralensis are relatively closer, and form a sister group, and then form paraphyletic group with a sister group which comprised of C. mongolus and C. alexandrinus. The results support Sibley's opinion of assigning R. avosetts and H. ostralensis which form Recurvirostrinae as a taxon of the Charadriidae, and the Charadriidae dividing into two subfamilies: Recurvirostrinae and Charadriinae respectively.