Re: Dinosaur Fossils Fit Perfectly Into The Evolutionary Tree Of Life

[David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

Unsurprisingly, this is a misrepresentation. What was investigated was the 
congruence between the tree and the order of appearance of the clades in the 
fossil record -- and this congruence was found to be remarkably good.

I'll use this opportunity to shamelessly plug our (Marjanovic & Laurin) 
Syst. Biol. paper (56(3): 369 -- 388; June 2007), which -- among many other 
things -- contains a similar inquiry into the congruence between the tree 
and the order of appearance in the fossil record for lissamphibians which is 
also very good (the chance that it's due to random is about 1 in 10,000), 
despite the fact that lissamphibian fossils are rare.