preview.tinyurl.com/6putsk -> www.newscientist.com/channel/life/dn14392-dinosaur-evolutionary-tree-unveiled.html?feedId=online-news_rss20
Cretaceous period, but a new study suggests that they were conspicuously absent from the 'terrestrial revolution' of that time, in which the number of land species rose rapidly.
Graeme Lloyd at the University of Bristol, UK, and his team studied all of the existing dinosaur taxonomic literature to produce a 'supertree' of dinosaur species. The new supertree, which includes 440 of the 600 known dinosaur species, shows that the dinosaurs evolved rapidly during their first 50 million years.
Explore the new supertree It remained at that low level throughout the following Cretaceous period, a time of plenty in Earth's terrestrial history in which flowering plants, lizards, snakes, birds and mammals all became much more numerous. Dinosaurs apparently did not take advantage of the abundant food supply that emerged during the Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution. "Our supertree allows us to look for unusual patterns across the whole of dinosaurs for the first time," says Lloyd. "It is the most comprehensive picture ever produced of how dinosaurs evolved."
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