Figure 1.

Age estimates for four nested theropod clades, across five different approaches for obtaining a dated phylogeny using the Xu et al. [1] dataset. Plotted boxes represent the first quantile, the median and the third quantile, respectively. From left to right, the approaches used are minimum node age dating and cal3, both applied to a sample of 100 randomly selected maximum-parsimony topologies, and three tip-dating approaches, the noSA and SA with BEAST2, and SA with MrBayes. The four clades examined (ordered left-to-right for each approach) are the root node (essentially, the Avetheropoda) and three clades with ‘branch-based’ definitions: the Coelurosauria (all taxa more closely related to modern birds than Sinraptor and Allosaurus), the Maniraptora (…than Ornithomimus) and the Avialae (…than Troodon or Deinonychus). (Online version in colour.)