A database of all dinosaur specimens in the world

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a database of all dinosaur specimens?

Well, there is — or at least, it’s on its way. Gunnar Bivens, who we know from SV-POW! comments as bricksmashtv, in creaing a vast Google-Docs Spreadsheet which at the time of writing has the following entries in various tabs:

• 1446 sauropods (Yay!)
• 50 theropods
• 2 thyreophorans (Hey, you gotta start somewhere.)
• 3 ornithopods
• 25 marginocephalians

Other tabs yet to be populated: basal dinosaurs, basal sauropodomorphs, basal ornithoscelidans, basal ornithischians.

(I think it’s a mistake to leap at the Baron et al. 2017 Ornithoscelida hypothesis, abandoning so precipitately the well-established Saurischia/Ornithischia division, but that’s how things stand.)

You can help

The spreadsheet is set up so that anyone can leave comments. Gunnar has done lots of work to get it going, essentially just by reading a ton of papers and entering all the details of dinosaur specimens — but no one person can possibly cover the whole literature.

Here’s what I think is the most efficient way to contribute: if you set up a Google Docs spreadsheet of your own, with the columns in the same order as Gunnar’s, then you can enter a bunch of specimens. When you’re ready, leave a comment on the relevant tab of the master spreadsheet pointing to your additions, and Gunnar can copy-paste them in.

Here is the link to the spreadsheet again. Get building!

References

• Baron, Matthew G., David B. Norman and Paul M. Barrett. 2017. A new hypothesis of dinosaur relationships and early dinosaur evolution. Nature 543:501–506. doi:10.1038/nature21700