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Palaeontology

Dividing the dinosaurs

Nature volume 543, pages 494–495 (2017)Cite this article

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The standard dinosaur evolutionary tree has two key branches: the 'bird-hipped' Ornithischia and the 'reptile-hipped' Saurischia. A revised tree challenges many ideas about the relationships between dinosaur groups. See Article p.501

Every child obsessed with dinosaurs knows that these creatures are grouped into the 'bird-hipped' Ornithischia (which includes the herbivorous stegosaurs, ceratopsians and duckbills) and the 'reptile-hipped' Saurischia, which are subdivided into the carnivorous Theropoda (such as Tyrannosaurus rex and birds) and the herbivorous Sauropoda (think Brontosaurus)1. Although this dinosaur family-tree arrangement seems universally acknowledged by everyone from children to wizened palaeontologists, we might all have to rearrange our mental furniture. On page 501, Baron et al.2 present a revolutionary proposal that the relationships of the major groups in the dinosaur evolutionary tree should be radically reorganized.

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Figure 1: The dinosaur evolutionary tree.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Kevin Padian is in the Department of Integrative Biology and the Museum of Paleontology, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.,

    Kevin Padian

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  1. Kevin Padian
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Correspondence to Kevin Padian.

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Padian, K. Dividing the dinosaurs. Nature 543, 494–495 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/543494a

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