An early burst of skeletal evolution at the origin of dinosaurs

This cool paper describes phylogenetic analyses which point with high probability to the dinosaurs emerging between 250 and 240 million years ago. The earliest dinosaur fossils we have date to around 230 million years ago, so I hope someone will search for fossils which fill the gap and justify the analyses even though such a search might result in nothing. The analyses are not 100% certain.

A beautiful thing about this paper is that the analyses are mathematical at their core. We can use mathematics to determine what could have happened in order to refine our search to determine what did happen. And it works the other way around too. We can feed new information about what did happen into mathematical models to refine our determination of what could have happened. I relish this exquisite loop.

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Author: Flower Snark
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