WIKIMEDIA, © 2005 DAVID MONNIAUXDinosaurs may have originated earlier than thought—just after a mass extinction some 250 million years ago—and they may be related to one another differently than scientists have long believed, according to a new analysis of 74 dinosaur species, including Tyrannosaurus rex. The study, published this week (March 22) in Nature, proposes an overhaul to the 130-year-old phylogenetic organization that lumped the meat-eating dinosaurs in with the long-necked plant-eaters, such as Brontosaurus.
“This paper does have the potential to make us rewrite textbooks and redesign museum exhibits,” paleontologist Thomas Holtz of the University of Maryland in College Park told Science. But, “before the American Museum of Natural History shifts all their dinosaur skeletons around, we have to remember this is just one paper.”
“We may be proved to be correct, we may not,” coauthor Matthew Baron, a paleontology graduate student at the University of Cambridge, told Reuters. “But what has to happen now is a complete abandonment of old dogmatic views across the field because we have shown that rigorous and objective studies can pull apart age-old ideas, and that we as scientists should never got too comfortable with an idea when it can still be tested ...
