Dinosaur

It's lovely to see such a positive response from everyone about this :) I'm tempted to just keep expanding the tree, filling out all the archosaurs (including crocodilians, pterosaurs) Here is the inkscape file and here is a 8000 pixel version. Feel free to print it out and do whatever you want with it, this is fair use. Making this was really fun, it took way longer than I thought but I learnt so much :) There's so much memorable stuff I found but I'll share some of my favourite discoveries The coleurosaurs are insanely diverse even if you ignore avian dinosaurs, I had to super simplify everything for space reasons. Gliders like Yi Qi, birds, pack hunters, giant herbivores like Therizinosaurus, and superpredators like the tyrannosaurs all really quite closely related to each other. They're surely one of the most successful animal lineages to ever evolve. Terror birds aren't really real, but rather a body plan that evolved independently multiple times across avian dinosaurs. Twice just in the lineage of birds that are closely related to ducks. Suddenly ducks seem kind of scary to me now That the radiation of hadrosaurs could be linked to the sudden radiation of flowering plants at the same time Birds weren't the sole group of dinosaurs to survive the K-Pg -well, they were but actually it was more like four or five groups of birds that already had ancient origins by the end of the Cretaceous & were already thriving Stegosaurs and Ankylosaurs are actually niche/rare animals that weren't particularly successful- my childhood was a lie. Actually loads of the history of dinosaur taxonomy was built around a few famous dinosaur species like Hypsilophodon, Iguanodon and Diplodocus that actually ended up being rather unimportant dead-ends in the grand scheme of things. Bird taxonomy is nightmareishly complicated, guess it's handy having them alive to study- we're glimpsing the true diversity of dinosaurs without the fog of fossilisation obscuring the past. A single branch of birds at the end of the tree, the Passeriformes, contains as many taxa as the rest of the infographic combined. There's a massive explosion in diversity of Ceratopsians and Hadrosaurs at the same time right at the end of the age of dinosaurs. Wonder what they would have become if their evolution wasn't cut off. More on reddit.com

All non avian dinosaurs went extinct avian ones were early birds and as such we still got birds More on reddit.com

It's a consequence of how we've chosen to classify things.

By definition, a "clade" consists of, first, a particular critter, and second, all of that critter's descendants. Whatever the first primate is, all of its descendants are also primates, and will continue to be primates, regardless of how different they may eventually become thanks to accumulated mutations. Similarly, the evidence we have (archæopteryx, etc) indicates that birds are descended from dinosaurs, so they're dinosaurs. And since dinosaurs are reptiles, birds must necessarily be reptiles… they're just a 'branch' of the reptile 'family tree' that's grown particularly different from critters that are commonly considered to be reptiles.

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Thank you for this! More on reddit.com