What is this document?

27th August 2002

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What is this document?

Answer

The goal of this document is to give you everything you need in order to start seriously learning about dinosaurs. It will take you from a standing start - assuming that you know nothing about biology, mechanics or taxonomy - to the point where you can understand deeply technical dinosaur-related material, including contemporary research papers.

It will do that by taking you through my own voyage of discovery. I'm taking a jump from a standing start: as I write these words of introduction, I am a dinosaur novice. I've read half a dozen ``popular'' dinosaur books, but now that I have started to dip my toes in the deeper waters of real dinosaur science, I am painfully aware of just how much I don't know. So nearly all of the questions this document answers will be the questions that I'm asking over the next few months as I gradually come up to speed.

If I'm such a novice, where will the expertise come from? I'll be asking the questions on the DINOSAUR mailing list (www.dinosaurmailinglist.org), collating and integrating replies from some of the most respected and influential dinosaur experts on the net. This should make it possible for the answers to cover all the various angles of contentious subjects like dinosaur metabolism, extinction theories, and whether commercial fossil hunters help or hinder science.

Most of the questions are generic - they investigate the sciences of classification and mechanics, discuss the history of palaeontology, etc. In among these questions are a few oddities - issues that just happen to intrigue me. I'm including on these the basis that if I find them interesting, so will others. So as well as the more foundational discussions, there are questions about the kink in Seismosaurus's tail, the Archaeopteryx hoax and of course, that old chestnut, which dinosaur was the biggest?

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