Smithsonian Magazine has a story about about dinosaur discovery.  Specifically, the rate of discovery and how many are left to be found.  New dinosaur species are described about every two weeks.  Which means around 25 or more new dinosaur species each year.  These new species come from all over the world.  A 2006 study estimated that 30% of all non-avian dinosaurs had already been found.  That estimate seems high, non-avian dinosaurs existed for 170 million years.  That’s a long time for evolution to experiment.  Unfortunately (or fortunately), fossilization is a random and rare process with weathering and geologic processes happening to destroy what was preserved.  Otherwise, we’d be awash in dinosaur bones…

Searching the rocks is only part of the required effort. Sometimes paleontologists know they’ve uncovered something new right away, but just as often discoveries are made in museum collections or through examining previously known fossils. “There are bound to be dinosaurs we don’t know about,” Poole says, “and some we may still find, either through new fossils or new analyses of what we already know.”

The numbers may be even greater than what paleontologists previously expected. “Today, about 14,000 dinosaur species live on as birds,” Brusatte says. “Do the math and we’re probably talking about millions of dinosaur species that once lived, maybe tens of millions.”

“So head out to the rocks, wherever they are,” he says, for “dragons be there.”