That's right in a way. There are almost too many specimens for the number of experts out there. There is always new stuff to find in collections. You aren't necessary to go out to a field and look for dinosaurs. You can just rummage through museum floors. You will find something new.

 

Recently Darren and a colleague did exactly that. They came across a bone which had been lying on a museum shelf since Victorian times. It may look unremarkable but with several unique features, it didn't fit with anything which had been found before. And it was enough for them to describe a new species. 

 

Wasn’t it really exciting to name a whole new species of dinosaur?

 

Yeah, yeah, we realized straightaway, but wow, this is something completely new. Naming a new species, you know, not such a big deal, is quite easy to do.

 

Really?

 

The finding, there are...

 

It's to me. You think there’d be a kind of once in a lifetime. Wow. I’ve named a new species of a dinosaur, but no?

 

No, it is a certain huge sways of the tree of life. There’s very little work that’d been done. Really, it’s quite easy to find new species. We’re in a golden age of dinosaur discovery. There’s about 50 new species of dinosaurs named every year.

 

Really?

 

About 90% of all named dinosaurs have been named since about 1990. If you were to generate a discovery curve of dinosaurs overtime, you would have a curve that shaped like this. And we are currently on the steep upward curve of the graph. 

 

Why do you think there is such a craze for naming new dinosaurs at the moment?

 

Regions of the world have been explored more. They haven’t been really looked at much beforehand. So places like southern South America, much of the central Asia, parts of Africa and Australia, more and more people are going out to those places, finding new dinosaurs and bringing them back. 

 

And the more we find, the more complete our understanding of the world of the dinosaurs becomes. It makes you realize just what a vast body of knowledge we now master about these extinct animals. So as a paleontologist can come along, look at a single bone and say, this must be a whole new species. And it also makes you wonder how many other dusty, unloved specimens are sitting there on store shelves, just waiting to be recognized.