24 July 2008

From so simple a beginning


Graeme Lloyd...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.
-- from Dinosaur evolutionary tree unveiled. Go here for larger image.

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