Ornithoscelida

About

"Ornithoscelida" refers to a newly proposed grouping of dinosaurs in an academic paper. Published in March 2017, the paper by Baron et al., titled "A new hypothesis of dinosaur relationships and early dinosaur evolution," hypothesizes that the long standing existing phylogeny for Dinosauria is incorrect. The revelation became the subject of memes after its publication.

Origin

In 1888, Harry Seeley split up the Group Dinosaura into two smaller groups; Saurischia and Ornithischia (colloquially known as Lizard-hipped and Bird-hipped respectively). This division has been considered the correct version for over 120 years.

The paper "A new hypothesis of dinosaur relationships and early dinosaur evolution" (Baron et al.)^[1] suggests that the two groups in Saurischia are not closely related, and proposes that Theropoda be merged with Ornithischia to form Ornithoscelida, while Sauropodomorpha and Herrerasauridae remain in Saurischia. The group compared anatomical features of many different early dinosaurs and decided that Seeley's classification, which was based on similarities of hip bones, was inaccurate.

Spread

The paper was first published in the Scientific Journal Nature March 22rd 2017. The same day, the website for Scientific American blog Tetrapod Zoology by Darren Naish made a blog post talking about the paper.^[3]

Several online paleontology communities discussed the implications of what the Baron et al. paper could mean if the hypothesis was found to be correct.^[5] On Tumblr, references to this revelation were sorted under the tag "The Befuckening."^[4]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References