Root bone splitting into multiple chains in Blender?

Hey guys, I'm trying to rig a bipedal character here. Unfortunately, the root bone simply breaks apart into 4 separate chains (Each leg, spine, and the tail this character has). I haven't ran into this issue before in blender, and I have no idea what might be causing this. Merge doesn't work between separate chains so that's not an option. Should I just constraint the bones together? That seems clunky and not likely to work well. Usually the bone is just one single bone that they all branch from... Using 2.67b version of Blender. Maybe it's an issue specifically for this version?