Dinosaur family tree gets major overhaul

AfroThunder396

[citation needed]
Jan 8, 2006
39,056
22,927
Miami, FL
The longstanding division of dinosaurs into 'bird-hipped' species including Stegosaurus and their 'lizard-hipped' counterparts such as Brachiosaurus and Tyrannosaurus rex may no longer be valid, a study published on 22 March in Nature contends1. Among the other proposed changes to the dinosaur family tree, the long-necked herbivorous and often gargantuan sauropods such as Brachiosaurus are no longer as closely related to bipedal, meat-eating theropods such as T. rex as they were under previous schemes.

“This is a textbook changer — if it continues to pan out,†says Thomas Holtz, a vertebrate palaeontologist at the University of Maryland in College Park. “It’s only one analysis, but it’s a thorough one.â€

The new study assesses kinship among 74 dinosaur species that span the family tree, on the basis of similarities or differences in more than 450 anatomical features, says Matthew Baron, a vertebrate palaeontologist at the University of Cambridge, UK, who led the study.

http://www.nature.com/news/dinosaur-family-tree-poised-for-colossal-shake-up-1.21681
 

Cogburn

Pretend they're yachts.
May 28, 2010
15,068
4,467
Vancouver
Well it's not earth shattering, having an earlier division of sauropods and theropods does sort of beaten up the tree a little. If not for the fossils of the animals hips, I'd definitely have grouped theropods far more separately from the other dinosaur groups.
 

Leafsdude7

Stand-Up Philosopher
Mar 26, 2011
23,135
1,213
Ontario
One thing I keep thinking about when I hear about this, considering the fact that I've learned from browsing around, is that there's actually apparently no comprehensive "tree of life" out there in the first place, so reshaping even one as relatively small as a subsection of the Dinosaur Family might be a massive undertaking as far as figuring out what does and doesn't move and where.
 

AfroThunder396

[citation needed]
Jan 8, 2006
39,056
22,927
Miami, FL
It's tough because we can only use species that have been discovered by science. Especially with fossils, we have such a minuscule fraction of species available to make the tree with. And of course we all try to fit new species into the existing tree. We want everything to fit nicely into perfect bifurcating trees, but evolution rarely happens in straight lines.

Today we know of five major apes: humans, chimps, gorillas, orangutans, and gibbons. But if we go back just 50,000 years, who knows how many there were? There would be at least three more species of human alive at the time, at least one species of orang, probably multiple more gorillas and chimps, and probably some new genera that are currently unknown to science.

And of course, everything is relative to what we already know. So when we look at fossils, for example, we assume that species in the Stegosaurus family are all going to look like Stegosaurus. But it's possible that Stegosaurus was a weird outlier, and all our assumptions we make based on it are not correct.

My adviser is convinced that humans bred with an unknown "ghost" species of hominin before leaving Africa, but it's hard to get support for that idea because there's no evidence such a hominin existed other than this one curious haplotype.
 

WarriorOfGandhi

Was saying Boo-urns
Jul 31, 2007
20,568
10,598
Denver, CO
it's interesting that they only focus on the first 100 million years of dinosaur evolution, I wonder if they decided there were too few new species after the T-J extinctions to justify going further
 

Johnnybegood13

Registered User
Jul 11, 2003
8,711
968
One thing I keep thinking about when I hear about this, considering the fact that I've learned from browsing around, is that there's actually apparently no comprehensive "tree of life" out there in the first place, so reshaping even one as relatively small as a subsection of the Dinosaur Family might be a massive undertaking as far as figuring out what does and doesn't move and where.
I would imagine this is fairly close as it's based on physical evidence and even DNA
dated-tree-of-life.jpg
 

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