Welcome to A Dinosaur A Day! This is a daily dinosaur(omorph) encyclopedia seeking to cover every single genus of dinosaur known to date. Though many such encyclopedias exist, ours is unique in a number of ways:
- We are covering every single dinosaur. This means, of course, well known animals (such as Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops), but also genera that aren’t commonly discussed (such as Angolatitan and Proa), ones that are fairly poorly known and thus not usually discussed for a reason (such as Lepidus and “Microdontosaurus”) and, of course, birds.In modern science, living things are classified primarily based on what they’re related to, rather than their physical traits (though, their physical traits are oftentimes used to determine these relationships – it’s complicated). As such, this means any living thing belongs to any group they evolved from. Since the evidence that birds evolved from dinosaurs is overwhelming, this means that birds ARE dinosaurs. As such, each and every single bird – from the poorest known fossil to the most common living species – will be covered herein as well.
As far as we are aware, there are no dinosaur encyclopedias which seek to cover all dinosaurs – including all birds – in this way. We hope to fill that void.
- There is an increasingly large body of evidence that (proto)feathers were found in the ancestor to all dinosaurs. This means that any dinosaur might have had this sort of fluffy covering on their bodies! While of course some dinosaurs decidedly had it (birds), some probably had it (Deinocheirus), some probably didn’t have it (Allosaurus), and some definitely didn’t have it in any significant way (Argentinosaurus), there is still a lot of wiggle room in reconstructions and a lot of interesting ways fluffy covering might have been present in dinosaurs. Given the prevailing public opinion that dinosaurs were, essentially, glorified lizards; it is rare to see images and depictions of dinosaurs with feathers, even when it is required (such as in Velociraptor).In order to fill this void in reconstructions, we will be going as fluffy as possible on this blog. While we will push the boundaries of plausibility (for example, Tyrannosaurus is unlikely to have been particularly feathery in any extent, but we will still represent it with floof), we will never cross the line of possibility. Thus, all these reconstructions herein are accurate. Likely? Maybe not. But this helps to round out the range of depictions of dinosaurs on the internet.
- We hope to bring modern, up-to-date dinosaur science to the public in accessible language and formatting – so that no one feels left out from this wonderful and exciting field of study! As such, we will simplify some terms (especially ones relating to anatomy) and streamline our treatment of species in order to bring to readers the easiest experience we can without sacrificing clarity and accuracy of language.
We hope all of you rising this blog will enjoy this unique dinosaurian experience – don’t hesitate to look around! There will be a new dinosaur entry every day, starting January 1st, 2019. We will be covering them in a semi-random order, to ensure variety in the content of our posts! Get excited, and pardon our dust while this site is under construction.
~ Meig & The Team
A Dinosaur A Day 