[Rockhounds] How Many Dinosaurs Remain Undiscovered?

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

Paleontologists are uncovering new dinosaurs at an astonishing rate. On
average, a new species of “terrible lizard” is named about every two weeks
<http://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2008/5905.html> from fossil sites all over
the world. And as experts announce each astonishing species, the nature of
the dinosaur family tree shifts. Fossil hunters are not just uncovering new
dinosaur species—they’re revealing entirely new dinosaur groups that were
unknown even ten years ago.

“One of my go-to lines whenever I’m giving a public talk or writing a pop
science article or book,” says University of Edinburgh paleontologist
Stephen Brusatte, “is that we’re in the golden age of paleontology.”

While the 19th-century “Bone Wars
<https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/dinosaur/>” are widely
known as when many dinosaurs were discovered and named, the early 21st
century is seeing the greatest dinosaur bone rush of all time.
Paleontologists are rapidly documenting various non-avian dinosaurs that
roamed our planet between 66 million and 235 million years ago—a span of
time more than two and a half times as long as the post-Cretaceous history
of our planet. And experts hypothesize that more dinosaurs remain unknown
than have been uncovered.

“Not all of these new dinosaurs are just another flavor of sauropod or
stegosaur, not just another type of tyrannosaur that differs from other
tyrannosaurs by a tiny bump on its snout or an extra tooth,” Brusatte says.
Some represent entire groups of dinosaurs paleontologists didn’t know about
and can alter the big picture of how dinosaur evolution unfolded through
the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-many-dinosaurs-remain-undiscovered-180982560/