New frontiers in dinosaur exploration

Two hundred years after the naming of the first dinosaur, taxonomic studies remain an important component of dinosaur research. Around 50 new dinosaurs are named each year and are discovered from across the globe. The rate of new dinosaur discovery shows no signs of slowing, but not all geographical areas and temporal windows have been equally investigated. The potential for new dinosaur discoveries in India and Africa seems particularly high, while the Carnian, when dinosaurs probably originated, and the Middle Jurassic, when the major clades diversified, offer the best opportunities to make discoveries that will fundamentally change our understanding of dinosaur evolution. A major challenge to the discovery of new dinosaurs is funding. Frontier fieldwork is sometimes viewed as too risky to fund, while basic taxonomic work is considered to lack impact. As a consequence, we risk an 'extinction of experience', where researchers have limited training in the basic field- and specimen-based research that underpins our discipline. Going forward, new remote sensing techniques may help to find prospective areas, while three-dimensional scanning apps on smartphones will allow us to quickly record field data. Artificial intelligence is likely to be used increasingly for computed tomography segmentation and identification of problematic fossils.