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DinoBase Launch


So I am managing an online resource called DinoBase. DinoBase was set up by Mike Benton of University of Bristol about 7 years ago, but had recently undergone a complete make-over. While the old DinoBase used to be literaly tens and hundreds of html pages, the new DinoBase features a dynamic system. It's pretty much a relational database, where all the different categories of information (e.g. genus, location, reference, etc.) are stored in separate tables but link to other tables. This enables data entry to become very quick and easy.

As far as the user is concerned, the information on these individual tables are pulled out and compiled onto a single page, just like any webpage, only that that particular page doesn't exist online as an individual page. So type in a dinosaur genus, species, year of description or author, click on the one you want to view and all the relevant information about that dinosaur will be presented in a single page. This, I think is a very cool system.

DinoBase also has features aside from the database itself. The forum is the newest addition to DinoBase which has quickly become promising. This takes up quite a bit of my energy as I always am on the look out for new dinosaurs to post under the 'Recent Discoveries' Forum or dinosaur-related news to introduce.

Just yesterday, we had a media-event (which I'm not really sure how much the media actually picked up on) where we invited children to explore DinoBase, work on some activity sheets downloadable from the site, look at some cool casts of dinosaur bones, or have a chat with Bristol palaeontologists. So that was the 'Official Launch'. Hopefully, we'll get more attention within the next few days...

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