Entrevistas aos bochechos: 7ª pergunta ao Paul Upchurch

RA: Going back a little bit on the sequence of questions, I think that your work on area cladograms and biogeography gives very interesting support where to look for dinosaurs and pursue new taxa. First of all, do you agree with this? And second, if you would have to use this data, where would you work for new taxa?

PU: The biogeographic approach I use, they provide some explanation why some types of dinosaur appear or do not appear in certain places and certain points in time. But of course, that can always be falsified by new discoveries. What I think that is more relevant to directly finding or targeting new localities is the work that my student and in conjunction with me is doing, we’ve built an almost comprehensive database of sauropod occurrences. So what that allows is an analysis like: do sauropod appears in certain types of sediments more often than others; are there areas of the earth that have produced poor quality sauropod material or good quality sauropod material? So I think large scale database are probably the future to a scientific approach to know where to go to collect new material.