Sunday, June 23, 2013

The Secret's in the hips (Or The One that's mostly Cladograms!!!)

First off sorry for being inactive but I had an eventful couple of weeks and not much time to write please forgive me.


Anyways back to the blog, now if you read the first post (DO IT NOW) you probably heard a few passing mentions to two groups of dinosaurs, these groups are Saruischia and Ornithischia. Aka Lizard Hipped and Bird Hipped Dinosaurs, ironically enough birds evolved from lizard hipped dinosaurs like velociraptor (Birds did not directly evolve from velociraptors) which as those who read my first post know had feathers.


Read the above
A Cladogram of Saurischia
An Ornithischian hip

Cladogram of Ornithischia
By the way for anyone who doesn't know a cladogram is in the most basic terms a way to list groups of animals by shared characteristics the science of this is called Cladistics. But anyways we can tell from cladistics that Deinonychus had feathers because it's relatives Velociraptor, Sinorithosaurus, Mei Long and Microraptor possessed this trait as well. Speaking of Deinonychus here is a Cladogram of the most famous dinosaur Clade/Suborder , Theropoda (Aka T.Rex, Velociraptors, Allosaurus all the meat eating dinosaurs)

By the way if you don't see T.rex or Velociraptor that's because they belong to Coelurosauria which also includes birds, that's right T.Rex is more closely related to Parrot's and Velociraptors than it was to Allosaurus, shocking huh? Now that we're done with Theropods let's check out Ornithischia the order that contains our favorite Herbivores (plant eaters) like Triceratops and Stegosaurus.
Cladogram of Thyreophora the Subgroup containing the living tank Ankylosaurus and the first youtube commenter,  I mean one of the stupidest dinosaurs Stegosaurus. I couldn't find a cladogram so fun fact time: Did you know triceratops was more related to duckbills and Pachycephalosaurs (Two Legged Bone headed dinosaurs) than to Ankylosaurus, I'll go into more detail next post.