Here’s a JPEG version of this insanely cool image, created by supercomputer.
What is the importance of this discovery?
Two things. We have made one of the biggest supertrees yet attempted – with 440 species. The more species you include, the more possible trees might exist – for 440, the number is huge, more than the number of atoms in the Universe. A year or two ago, this wouldn’t have been possible, but now, with ever-faster and larger computers, problems like this can be tackled. Second, we have used statistical approaches for the first time to determine the real pattern of dinosaurian evolution and to test for times of unusually high rates of diversification.What is a supertree?
A supertree is a tree made up from many ’source’ trees, the original published trees. In this case, we tracked down 155 published trees, some of which covered only a family, others a larger group. These are then combined to produce the best fitting single solution. Of course, the source trees, published by dozens of palaeontologists around the world, include all sorts of conflicts and disagreements. So the supertree methods have to find ways to find the ‘majority’ or strongest verdict.
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