Scientists uproot dinosaur family tree
(Artdaily.org)

For 130 years, dinosaurs have been classified as either bird- or reptile-hipped -- the first and all-important split in the trunk of an intricate family tree. On Wednesday, a `revolutionary` study threatened to upend what has long been taken as gospel by preschoolers and palaeontologists alike -- that a dinosaur`s evolutionary history can be determined by the shape of its pelvis. `Our study overturns 130 years of dogma,` said study co-author Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum. `Our analysis suggests that animals like T. rex were actually more closely related to Stegosaurus` -- dinos once thought to be firmly on either side of the hip divide. A new dinosaur evolutionary tree, published in the journal Nature, proposes two new base groups, in which bird- and reptile-hipped lizards are now mixed. It also suggests that dinosaurs arose around 247 million years ago -- some 10 million years earlier