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DINOSAURS! The Biggest And Baddest Are Yet To Be Found

Posted Sep 05, 2006 at 09:48AM by KJM Listed in: Paleontology Tags: China, Africa
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They ranged from huge, ravenous, flesh-eating nightmares with teeth the size of professional butcher knives, all the way down to harmless little plant eaters the size of a house cat...and everything in between.

Dino


It's hard to think of anyone that hasn't been fascinated by dinosaurs at some point in their lives. As a child, I could name and draw sketches of virtually every known species. In those days, of course, that was no great feat. Since then, the number of known and described dinosaur species has exploded from a handful to well over 500 - and new ones are being discovered every year.

Now, a statistician and  palaeontologist  have  analyzed these figures using a standard mathematical model linking observed data to the unseen. Steve Wang and Peter Dodson have concluded that over 70% of all dinosaur species have yet to be discovered - perhaps as many as 1800 of them.

"We are currently living in a dinosaur renaissance, with unprecedented numbers of discoveries every year,” statistician Wang says. Because of an explosion of findings in China and Argentina, there have been more dinosaur species discovered in the last 20 years than in the previous 200. "Perhaps Africa will be the next region to blossom," Wang adds. He also thinks it is possible that nearly half of the remaining species may never be discovered because of a lack of fossil evidence.

Regarding their extinction, paleontologists are starting to believe they were already on their way out before a meteorite strike put the last nail in their coffin around  65 million years ago. Wang and Dodson (the paleontologist)  compared the dinosaur diversity in the last six million years of the Cretaceous - known as  the Maastrichtian Stage – with the preceding six million years.  They found no change, but the model was not detailed enough to show whether a slight decline had already set in by the time of the meteor strike, according to Dodson.

[Via New Scientist] Permalink  |   Email this  |   Linking Blogs   |   Digg It!

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2 Comments


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   by me (Unregistered) - 2006-09-05

cool

   by tinglemaps - 2006-09-06
 » 70% huh?
locgically speaking, fossil records probably record less than 1millionth of a percent of all the life that has ever lived.
to form a fossil you'd have to die in a place where your body is quickly covered and where minerals can freely flow around your corpse. this is why you don't find fossils everywhere around the world, but only places where the environment was conducive to fossilization. This is also why no one would be able to dig up your gramma's fossils in 10,000 years. (unless she died in a mudslide or something)
my point is, most of the extinct lifeforms on earth will never be discovered through fossil remains.



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