Untangling the dinosaur family tree

LANGER, MAX C.; EZCURRA, MARTÍN D.; RAUHUT, OLIVER W. M.; BENTON, MICHAEL J.; KNOLL, FABIEN; MCPHEE, BLAIR W.; NOVAS, FERNANDO E.; POL, DIEGO; BRUSATTE, STEPHEN L.

NATURE

NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP

Año: 2017 vol. 551 p. 501 - 506

0028-0836

For over a century, the standard classification scheme has split dinosaursinto two fundamental groups1: ?lizard-hipped? saurischians(including meat-eating theropods and long-necked sauropodomorphs)and ?bird-hipped? ornithischians (including a variety of herbivorousspecies)2?4. In a recent paper, Baron et al.5 challenged this paradigmwith a new phylogenetic analysis that places theropods and ornithischianstogether in a group called Ornithoscelida, to the exclusion ofsauropodomorphs, and used their phylogeny to argue that dinosaursmay have originated in northern Pangaea, not in the southern part ofthe supercontinent, as has more commonly been considered6,7. Herewe evaluate and reanalyse the morphological dataset underpinningthe proposal by Baron et al.5 and provide quantitative biogeographicanalyses, which challenge the key results of their study by recovering aclassical monophyletic Saurischia and a Gondwanan origin for dinosaurs.This shows that the Ornithoscelida hypothesis is not the finalword, and that there is still great uncertainty around the basic structureof the dinosaur family tree. There is a Reply to this Comment by Baron,M. G. et al. Nature 551, http://doi.org/10.1038/nature24012 (2017).