All Those New Dinosaurs May Not Be New — Or Dinosaurs

[sauroid]

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/all-those-new-dinosaurs-may-not-be-new-or-dinosaurs/

"genuses" though 

[stargatedalek]

This is honestly pretty pointless rehashing of data, and it's misleading. The author is twisting these data sets to make it look like paleontologists are making up dinosaurs (which is a dangerous slippery slope). All of this data is completely reasonable if not expected. Of course there's going to be a lot of species that end up being sunk into others, that's simply the nature of the science. Naturally a lot of remains initially attributed to dinosaurs end up being reassigned, they had a lot of very close relatives. It only makes sense that the rate at which new species are named will increase as more areas develop access to mining infrastructure and perhaps more crucially begin to value their natural history. And obviously there are going to be a lot more extinct proposed species invalidated than modern ones, that should go without saying.

I've seen less dumbed-down data on Animal Planet.

[Halichoeres]

Theropod people: Is the theropod problem cited herein even real? The tally includes a lot of Mesozoic birds, which surely don't represent an oversampling of predators. To the extent that more predators are named, many are meso-predators and so might not represent a problem either if you're ignoring all the non-dinosaur herbivores, for example.

[stargatedalek]

Theropod people: Is the theropod problem cited herein even real? The tally includes a lot of Mesozoic birds, which surely don't represent an oversampling of predators. To the extent that more predators are named, many are meso-predators and so might not represent a problem either if you're ignoring all the non-dinosaur herbivores, for example.

Most of these theropods being named are not apex predators, and IIRC about half of them last year are actually birds. A likely explanation for this comes back to what I mentioned earlier about new areas finding fossils, a lot of these areas are providing us with an abundance of smaller more fragile animals, such as birds. So no, the problem isn't real.