Re: Standard taxonomic and geographic refererences

[Rich Grenyer <r.grenyer@ic.ac.uk>]

Dear Ken,

Oops - that'll teach me for not checking through the names of people 
who post to the list...

Thanks for the advice -  Dinobase I have already (as of this morning 
- always the way), and exceptionally useful it seems to be; 
particularly as the families are compatible with Michael Benton's 
Fossil Record database so I can get ages for the groups relatively 
quickly.  A measure of the arrangement of the higher taxa is my next 
goal, and looks to be a lot more tricky, particularly in combination 
with the ages of the groups (does any one have any idea how the 
stratigraphic dates generally accord with any of the accepted 
phylogenetic hypotheses, by the way - haven't had a chance to have a 
look yet....)

There's one other rather simple (ie. lazy..) question: When a species 
description is published from dinosaur material, presumably a museum 
or collection catalgue number is included, but what sort of 
geographic location material is usually included in the paper? Does 
it take the form of 'Kayenta formation, Arizona', or is it usually 
more specific - I'm guessing lat/long is too much to ask for. If such 
information isn't usually included, is it for reasons of site 
security, and is that information often available from the 
collection/museum/author? I know this is a bit of a soft question but 
I can't find _any_ dinosaur descriptions in the library here at all...

Cheers for the help so far,

Rich


>     Taxonomic and geographic references.  That caught my attention 
> (even early on a Saturday morning), since I was co-author and 
> co-editor of Honacki, Kinman & Koeppl, 1982  (which preceded Wilson 
> and Reeder, 1993).
>      Anyway, the most up-to-date dinosaur species lists are 
> naturally online, and you might start with Dinobase at the 
> University of Bristol (maintained by one of Michael Benton's 
> students).  Typing in Dinobase in any good search engine should 
> bring up a link to it (if not, I can get it for you).  Another one 
> is called Dinodata.  But I don't know of any which contain 
> comprehensive geographical data for each species (as we did for 
> mammals).  Perhaps someone is working on such a comprehensive online 
> dinosaur catalog, but I am mainly interested in taxonomy at family 
> and ordinal level, so I haven't really looked for one.
>                  Cheers, Ken Kinman
> ********************************************************

--
______________________________________________
Rich Grenyer

Mammalian Evolution and Conservation
Biology Department
Imperial College at Silwood Park
Sunningdale
Berkshire
SL5 7PY

Telephone: +00 44 (0)20 7594 2328
Fax:            +00 44 (0)20 7594 2339
email: r.grenyer@ic.ac.uk
______________________________________________