cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/46450

Dinosaurs are among the most majestic and iconic animals to have ever walked on our planet. While they are now extinct, they are estimated to have inhabited Earth for over 165 million years.

Countless past studies have examined dinosaur fossils and tried to delineate their origin and evolution over time. Nonetheless, much about the history of these disappeared animals remains poorly understood.

Researchers at Yale University and Princeton University recently tried to re-trace the origins and early diversification of dinosaurs by analyzing available datasets using advanced statistical techniques. The results of their analyses, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggest that dinosaurs might have originated between 250 and 240 million years ago, which is around 10 million years earlier than indicated by the oldest confirmed dinosaur fossils.

“Over 230 million years of Earth’s history, dinosaurs became a major terrestrial animal clade and produced one of the most species-rich living tetrapod lineages: birds,” wrote Chase Doran Brownstein and Christopher Thomas Griffin in their paper.

“Yet, largely because of uncertainty surrounding the phylogeny of early dinosaurs, the tempo and mode of their emergence and initial radiation remain poorly constrained. We reconstruct the initial diversification of dinosaurs through Bayesian tip-dating analyses.”

---

From Biology News - Evolution, Cell theory, Gene theory, Microbiology, Biotechnology via This RSS Feed.