New frontiers in dinosaur exploration

200 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 geographic 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 ..., Collector curves–All dinosaur regular genera and species, both valid and invalid, were downloaded from the Paleobiology Database (PBDB; paleobiodb.org) on 17th December 2024. The data were cleaned to remove Avialae, ichnotaxa, and ootaxa. Taxa that were listed as invalid due to misspellings, obsolete variates, or that were renamed for grammatical or linguistic reasons were removed. Nomina dubia, nomina nuda, objective and subjective synonyms, and recombinations were retained. Collector curves (Fig. 1) were built in R 3.4.0 [124]. Code and raw data are available in the Supplementary Material. 
Time-calibrated phylogeny–A consensus dinosaur phylogeny was manually produced in Mesquite [125]. First and last appearance data were collected for all taxa in the phylogeny and are listed in the data file provided in the Supplementary Material. First and last appearances generally correspond to the earliest and latest dates of the Stage from which the taxon is known, unless more accurate info..., , # New frontiers in dinosaur exploration

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.05qfttfd3](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.05qfttfd3)

## Description of the data and file structure

These data were collected to review the state of dinosaur taxonomy and systematics today, as part of an invited review titled 'New Frontiers in Dinosaur Exploration'. The raw data tables in xlsx and csv format were downloaded from the Paleobiology Database or Scopus and then cleansed according to the methods provided here and in the publication. The .txt file was compiled from the literature, while the .nex file is a phylogenetic tree that represents a consensus dinosaur phylogeny and was hand-built in Mesquite. 

### Files and variables

#### File: Ages.txt

**Description:** A file showing the first and last appearance data for dinosaur taxa in the phylogenetic tree. This file is needed for time-calibration of the phylogenetic tree (DinotreeR1.nex) and is used in the code \"Time-calibration_palaeotree.R\".

##### Varia...,