An article published in the journal “Journal of Biogeography” describes a research that led to recreate the possible outline of the migrations of dinosaurs during the Mesozoic era and concluded that there was particularly a very important one from today’s Europe in the Cretaceous, between 146 and 100 million years ago. These results were obtained by applying for the first time network theory to paleontology.

Network theory has been applied over the years to various sciences and lately has become commonly used in the analysis of relationships among people on the Internet and especially on social networks. Certain applications arrive quickly, however in biology network theory started being applied only recently. Dr. Alex Dunhill of the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds, lead author of this research, and his collaborators applied it to dinosaur migrations.

The researchers used the Paleobiology Database, which contains information on all the dinosaur fossils discovered that are documented and accessible in the world. Data about dinosaurs belonging to the same family but lived on different continents were crossed with the periods in which they lived. This revealed connections that showed the migrations of those dinosaur families.

Past research already uncovered various migrations occurred at a time when today’s continents were joined in the Pangea but also after it split. According to the most plausible hypothesis, temporary land bridges formed as a result of changes in sea levels, reconnecting for some time continents that had become separate and allowing new migrations.

The surprise came from the fact that the research showed that in the lower Cretaceous there was an exodus from today’s Europe to other continents. It’s also curious that there was a migration from Europe to other continents but not the other way around.

Dr. Dunhill himself admitted that he has no explanations for this result. It could be the consequence of a real migratory pattern still to be understood or the result of an error due to lack in the fossil record that somehow altered some results.

This biogeographic research is very interesting and certainly will have paleontologists argue about it. The application of network theory to such studies can certainly be improved to provide better models reducing error margins. Any new approach needs to be refined, in this case to help a better reconstruction of the global history of dinosaurs.