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For
as long as I can remember I have always maintained an
interest in dinosaurs and fossils....from collecting
the plastic models as a ten year old to visiting dinosaur
museums, buying books, watching the Jurrasic Park movies
and looking for fossils around Lyme Regis....
Of
course as an adult I have never had the opportunity
to pursue this interest - again if I had the time and
money I would love to travel the world in search of
fossils and studying existing remains and museum artefacts.
However that is not yet a plausable option and the best
I can hope for would be to re-establish my collection
of plastic dinosaurs. From
what I can recall my first collection included a Brontasauras,
Stegosauras, Anklyosaurus, Triceratops and of course
the Tyranosaurus Rex. Within my GCSE Art exam year I
was also able to complete a masterpeice of a number
of dinosaurs within a forest clearing - unfortunately
I am only left with the memory of this as I never went
back to the school to collect any of this work.
And
so this section of my website aims to capture those
fading memories of my dinosaur years....a basic classification
of dinosaurs (Sauropodomorpha and Thereopoda),
the Benton Classification. Dinosaur classification itself
began in 1842 when Sir Richard Owen
placed Iguanodon, Megalosaurus, and Hylaeosaurus in 'a distinct
tribe or suborder of Saurian Reptiles.' In 1887 and 1888 Harry
Seeley divided dinosaurs into the two orders Saurischia and Ornithischia, based on their hip structure.
The largest change was prompted by entomologist Willi Hennig's work in the 1950s, which evolved
into modern cladistics. For
specimens known only from fossils, the
rigorous analysis of characters to determine evolutionary relationships
between different groups of animals (clades) proved incredibly useful.
When computer-based analysis using cladistics came into its own in the 1990s, paleontologists became among
the first zoologists to almost
wholeheartedly adopt the system. Progressive scrutiny and work upon dinosaurian interrelationships, with the aid
of new discoveries that have shed light on previously uncertain relationships
between taxa, have begun to yield a stabilizing classification since the
mid-2000s. While cladistics is the predominant classificatory system among
paleontology professionals, the Linnean system is still in use, especially in
works intended for popular distribution.
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