An international team of scientists has created a familiar dinosaur "supertree" that summarizes at a glance the evolution of these large reptiles and the relationships between 440 species of the 600 known so far. The work, which is published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B , collects all the research carried out by the world's dinosauriologists during the last two decades.
The tree shows, among other things, that the greatest diversification in these animals took place during the first 50 million years of evolution . This implies that dinosaurs did not benefit from food sources that emerged later, during the revolution of the Cretaceous period (flowering plants, lizards, snakes, birds, and mammals).
Dinosaur Supertree , University of Bristol (http://palaeo.gly.bris.ac.uk/supertree/)
