Letter: When dinosaurs really got reinstated as a group

From Gregory Paul Baltimore, Maryland, US

Colin Barras writes that dinosaurs were “reinstated as a scientific fact” in the 1980s (5 May, p 38). But in 1974 Robert Bakker and Peter Galton published “Dinosaur monophyly and a new class of vertebrates” (doi.org/ftw3f9).

This led to dinosaurs being widely accepted as a single distinct group. Almost all phylogenetic studies since have come to similar findings. As Bakker and I later noted, the subdivision of dinosaurs into ornithischians and saurischians has always been weak because the latter may not be a real group. Whether we currently have enough data to settle that issue is problematic.

The editor writes:
• Bakker and Galton's 1974 paper was, in retrospect, the beginning of the turning point, but it was apparently greeted at the time with a “firestorm” of controversy.