Comments on: Will We Ever Find All the Dinosaurs?

By: George Richter

George Richter — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 15:55:46 +0000

Angels assisted God with the creation of the Earth and its creatures. We know that at the time of God’s command to adore His Son, Lucifer was aware of human type creatures whose nature was lower than angel nature (See the Satanic Verses in the Qur’an.) It is possible that God left the angels to follow His instructions, and they played games creating exagerated creatures – like dinosaurs. Dinosaurs had wings? Angels have wings.
God quietly changed things on Earth, getting rid of the dinosaurs before creating humans with an immortal soul -quite different from all prior creatures.
George

By: Mari

Mari — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 03:34:19 +0000

How impoverishing if we ran out of dinosaurs! I certainly hope we never run out of new finds.

By: Frank DiSalle

Frank DiSalle — Sun, 15 Jul 2012 23:20:39 +0000

David – never think of the future as “what we have now, but more and better…”
Think of it as, “We can’t even imagine the ways archeologists will work 1,000 years from now, or what tools they will use.”
I always think of a series of books called “Cities In Flight” by James Blish. In his conception of the future, whole cities , due to a lack of resources and the pressure of population, were able to leave Earth using anti-gtavity devices called “spindizzies”. The cities were managed by mainframe computers, and the managers used slide rules (!!)
Mainframes and slide rules !!
See what I’m driving at, David ?

By: Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.

Thomas R. Holtz, Jr. — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 14:00:53 +0000

David: your question is actually the theme of an excellent book that reviews issues of fossilization, sedimentology, tectonics, and the like: The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks? (2009, Jan Zalasiewicz)

By: David

David — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 07:01:49 +0000

What if we turn the question around? Are we leaving enough fossils in the ground? In a million years (or two million, or ten million), when this civilization is gone, and some new one has taken its place, will that civilization’s scientists be able to learn everything that ours have about prehistoric life? Or will we have dug up all the accessible fossils, and when our museums and archives are gone, will we have left those future scientists nothing to go on?

By: Craig Dylke

Craig Dylke — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 23:54:28 +0000

Great post, with the sad truth about Dinosaur studies. In good news that also means we’ll probably never run out of new ones to find either!

I want to hear/read the rational for a mere 1800 genera though… especially from Dodson (I’ve been reading a lot of his stuff lately as it is brilliant). That boils down to roughly 100 genera per million years of Dinosaur existence (roughly).

Now I know that Dino diversity started lower and grew throughout their run. So in the Triassic you would have a pretty low count. Also towards the beginning the contienents were less isolated, and so you could (in theory) have wider spread populations of genus. That however is only the case till the mid to late Jurassic. As of the Cretaceous all bets are off on low Dinosaur diversity.

Splitting 100 genera geographically across the globe seems unrealistically thin, espcially in light of what we already know about certain periods. Dinosaur Provincal Park, a small section of prehistoric Alberta has 2 Tyrannosaurid, at least 2 Dromaeosaurids, 1 Ornithomimid, 1 Oviraptor, 1 Therizinosaur, 1 Troodontid, 1 Ankylosaurid, 1 Nodsaur, at least 2 Pachycephalosaurs, at any one time it also had 2 centrosaurines, 1 chasmosaurine, 2 lambeosaurines, and 1 hardosaurine. That’s 16 in one area of an isolated mere THIRD of North America (and most of which are probably only representing lowland floodplain animals of the region. A few of the rarer ones might represent highland animals, but I doubt we have a comprehensive record of these animals in the park). Wander down the coast a few thousand Kilometers and we get a similar set of similar but yet unique animals in Montana (minus some of the theropods). Wander down to Utah and you get the same thing. Repeat a few more times to Mexico. That’s starting to use up the 100 genra for 75 million years ago incredibly quickly, and we’ve only covered ONE subcontinent of three for North America! What about the rest of the world?!?

So unless you’re condensing Dinosaurs like Gregory Paul (all Centrosaurines are actually Centrosaurs and all crested hadrosaurs are just Lambeosaurus… apparently) I’m not buying a number anywhere near as low as 1800. Eighteen THOUSAND sounds reasonable to me.

By: Doug

Doug — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 22:21:23 +0000

Scott Sampson told me that just about everything they dig out of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is new and said that people will be finding stuff for decades to come. Which is good news for me since it’s one of the places i want to look for dinosaurs (that is, if i ever get my museum off the ground). And even if we don’t find them all, there are still plenty named but poorly represented genera that need more material to be discovered. Like the Morrison Theropods. I consider it one of the greatest riddles of paleontology. We know there was a highly diverse carnivore guild in North America 145 million years ago, but why are they all so poorly represented while Allosaurus is found the most? I’d rather find a new specimen of Torvosaurus or Saurophaganax or Stokesosaurus instead of a new species.

By: Andrea Cau

Andrea Cau — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 17:44:25 +0000

The problem of how many species of dinosaurs we’ll find is also linked to the concept of species used.
Consider that, at least from a biological perspective (the one a hypothetical time traveler would follow if visiting the Mesozoic), all those closely related species of dinosaurs that existed but differed each other for soft parts or for behavioural aspects but were identical in hard anatomy will never be detected from fossils alone and thus will be lumped into a single specie.