The Future of Dinosaurs

Ever since we first started discovering dinosaurs in the early 1800s, our obsession for uncovering everything about these creatures has been insatiable. Each generation has made huge strides in trying to better our understanding of these animals, and in the past twenty years, we have made more discoveries than in the previous two hundred.

There have been extraordinary advances in palaeontological methods, and ever more dinosaur fossils promise a landslide of new data and huge leaps forward in our understanding of these incredible animals. Over time, we have been able to look at the sizes and shapes of bones, identified patches of fossil skin, examined footprints and bite marks, and calculated mass estimates and walking speeds.

With surprisingly little data to work from, we can piece together an image of an animal that has been extinct for a million human lifetimes. Yet, despite our technological advances and two centuries of new data and ideas, there is still much more we don't know. What parasites and diseases afflicted them? How did they communicate? Did they climb trees? How many species were there?

In The Future of Dinosaurs, palaeontologist Dr David Hone examines the recent strides in scientific research and the advanced knowledge we've gathered in recent years, as well as what we hope to learn in the future about these most fascinating of extinct creatures.