Well it is has FINALLY happened. After a lot of hard work on the part of many people in Bristol, DinoBase was officially launched today. DinoBase is a new interactive resource for dinosaur fans of all ages.As Mike Benton notes, ‘We all know that people have a natural curiosity for dinosaurs, so we hope that the information on DinoBase will satisfy people's enthusiasm.'
You can search the database for your favourite dinosaur, find out its species, when and where it lived, what it ate, how big it was and how to pronounce its tongue-twisting Latin name. Also try browsing the colourful picture galleries to see what dinosaurs looked like in their prehistoric world.
Did you know, for example, that the Albertaceratops nesmoi, which means ‘Alberta horn-faced’, was only discovered this year in Canada? It is a centrosaurine ceratopsian dinosaur with a pair of long horns on the brow and a blade-like nasal horn. It lived about 75 million years ago, was 6 metres long and weighed 2 tons.
DinoBase also has an online forum, where you can ask questions about dinosaurs, which experts at Bristol University will answer. The database will continue to grow in the future as new discoveries are made and more features are added. There will be a news section that will report the most recent happenings in dinosaur research, and a ‘New Dinosaur’ alert system that will let visitors know about new discoveries.
I would like to thank a lot of people for their hard work, but most especially for the people on our team who have made the final push in last week, including Paul Ferry, Manabu Sakamoto and Tom Fletcher.
Check out DinoBase at http://dinobase.gly.bris.ac.uk/
