Total known Dinosaur species?

[Mike Taylor <mike@indexdata.com>]

Dustin Mendus writes:
 > Hi, I'm looking for a website, PDF, or book which has a recent
 > total of all known dinosaur species preferably from 2008, but 05-07
 > is acceptable. I'm sourcing this in a research paper.

The most recent published count is that of Wang and Dodson (2006):

        Wang, Steve C., and Peter Dodson.  2006.  Estimating the
        diversity of dinosaurs.  PNAS 103 (37): 13601-13605.

They wrote (p. 13601), "we currently recognize 527 valid known genera
of dinosaurs, excluding genera based on isolated teeth or single
elements" and also noted (p. 13603) "90% of dinosaur genera are
monospecific (the mean number of species is 1.2, with 98.3% of genera
having 3 or fewer species)", so they recognised about 1.2 * 527 = 632
species.

However, there are two things to note here: 1. Dodson is rather
conservative in what he recognises as valid: for example, by omitting
all genera based on single elements, he would rule out distinct,
diagnosable genera such as Xenoposeidon; and 2. the rate of new names
is not slowing down, in fact I find it hard to keep track of all the
new dinosaurs.

 _/|_    ___________________________________________________________________
/o ) \/  Mike Taylor    <mike@indexdata.com>    http://www.miketaylor.org.uk
)_v__/\  "Omit needless words" -- Strunk & White.