New Scientist
Image: Mykl Roventine
Dinosaurs may have been the largest land animals of the 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. By the Middle to Late Jurassic, a period famous for its giant dinosaurs including Diplodocus and Allosaurus, dinosaur evolution had slowed to a crawl. Read more on newscientist.com…
