![]() ![]() Marsh invented a sauropod family named Atlantosauridae. For example, many years ago dinosaur expert Othniel C. Paleontologists have often been confused about how to classify and name certain fossils. ![]() Differences in skeletal details may be due to differences between sexes (sexual dimorphism), age, disease, or other natural variation among individuals. When skeletons are compared more closely, we sometimes find that animals previously classified into two or three different species are actually one species. New fossil discoveries and new studies of previously classified fossils may increase or decrease the number of known species. The number of species of dinosaurs may go up or down as new fossils are found and as more research is completed. We haven’t found any current estimates, but by the end of 1981 (according to an article in the Scientific American), there was only a total of about 5,000 fragments of dinosaur skeletons. ![]() So, relatively few remains have actually been obtained by museums and paleontologists. Dinosaur fossils are often expensive to excavate and collect. Many of these “different species” were actually assigned separate names based on scanty fossil evidence, sometimes only a tooth or vertebra. We’ve seen figures between 250 and 550 or more (one research estimated a whopping 500,000 species). Nobody really knows the answer to this question. How many species of dinosaurs were there? Dinosaur Species: How many species of dinosaurs were there? (The Great Dinosaur Mystery and the Bible) - ChristianAnswers.Net ![]()
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