Paleontology and Evolutionary Biology

Paleontology reconstructs the history of life from physical remains preserved in rock, and the study of dinosaurs sits at the center of some of the most consequential questions in evolutionary biology. By combining fossil morphology, comparative anatomy, and increasingly, molecular data from living relatives, researchers trace how major lineages — theropods, sauropods, and the birds that descended from them — diversified, migrated, and responded to shifting environments over roughly 165 million years. Much of the current work focuses on resolving the deep branching relationships within Dinosauria through phylogenetic analysis, where even well-studied groups are regularly reorganized as new specimens emerge from undersampled regions like sub-Saharan Africa and Antarctica. Open questions remain about the tempo of evolutionary change near the origin of birds, the physiological and behavioral traits that allowed certain lineages to survive mass extinction events, and how growth rates and body-size evolution varied across the clade.

Works

121,057

Total citations

849,324

Keywords

DinosaurEvolutionPhylogenetic AnalysisPaleontologyBirdsSauropod