Links to other sites:

Dinosaurierspuren! - German. A well made website about dinosaur tracks.
Contact the author of this website (the one you're looking at right now) at vong@scifi.pages.at

I am not a scientist, I wouldnt even go so far to call myself a "hobby palaeontologist" since being one (from my personal point of view!) includes much more then my mere "obsession" with dinosaurs in general and theropods in particular. It all started when I was about 3 years old and first saw pictures of dinosaurs in the book "The world we live in" released here in germany in 1956. I still remember that the first dinosaur I "fell in love with" was the Allosaurus depicted on page 108 of that book. Allosaurus (Allosaurus fragilis to be more precise) remained my "favorite dinosaur" for a very long time. About half a year later, I had learned all dinosaur names from that book before I could even read them myself. My "poor" parents had to read the pages about dinosaurs over and over again and again and again and again... I guess this may be one reason why my mother still takes an instant dislike to anything looking only remotly like a reptile ;-) !
Now, being 38 years older, I still find myself being a "dinomaniac" and I am still unable to tell what exactly it is that fascinates me so much about those animals. My best guess would be that it primarily has something to do with that unique mixture of elegance, majesty, agility and speed but also intelligence and a bit of roguishness I find best expressed in the Deinonychosauria, amongst which Velociraptor mongoliensis (specially in the reconstructions shown in "Dinosaur Planet" - yes, there is a reason why you meet these little beauties so often on these pages!) gets closest to the optimal balance of those characters for my taste. But enough of this, time to get a bit more serious again!

"Why palaeontology, why dinosaurs?" is a question many people have asked me so far and my usual answer is as follows: We live on an everchanging planet. Nothing stays as it is for a very long time. During most of it's history our planet, the world we evolved on, didnt even provide conditions suitable to Homo sapiens for survival at all! Even worse, sometimes the conditions on our planet change so dramatically that to describe it as the "warm cuddly nest" we like to see it as is a mere bad joke. And as if that alone wasnt bad enough, we human beings, despite the fact that we really should know better by now, do our very best to destroy the only world we know of so far that is capable of supporting human life! We plunder the planet of it's resources in order to support our stupid wars, we pollute the air we must breath, the water we must drink and the soil we must walk on. We eradicate species of which's possible functions within our environment we dont have the slightest idea - as a species, we behave like a person deliberatly dedicated to commit suicide. We act exactly like some precocial animals do, the main difference being that we cannot simply leave our "nest" and go somewhere else once we cant bear with the stink of our own shit anymore! As dark as this picture may look at first glance, it is far from being hopeless! Many of us have started to realize that violence is no means to solve any problems. We are starting to cut down on our senseless waste of irreplaceable resources. To make it short: We apparently have started to realize that intelligence is the single resource we will never run out of! But what else is "intelligence" then the ability to understand the universe around us and the world we are living on? Understanding the mechanisms that make (and made!) our biosphere "tick" (and sometimes "un-tick"!) will be essential to our survival as a species (even if we should be able to reach other, habitable worlds one day, that knowledge will still remain essential!). But how can we hope to understand the mechanisms at work in the present without understanding the evolutionary processess that led to the development of these mechanisms in the first place? Thats why palaeontology, thats why acquisition of every bit of knowledge about every dinosaur, every amoeba, every huge geologic formation, every atom and so on are all equally important to our survival - wether any of these are present with us right now is of no significance at all since they all equally contribute/d to the process we all would like to see to continue so much: Life!

Finally I would like to say a "few" words concerning a "phenomenon" I personally have only recently become aware of: Creationism, intelligent design - or whatever name the adherents to this (actually very old and obsolete) form of religious fanatism may give their faith. First of all: Creationism and the likes are a form of religion, NOT science! Creationists claim that the planet earth is about 6000 years old, that non-avian dinosaurs lived alongside humans and that evolution is just a theory, not a fact (just to name a few of their most ridiculous claims). They usually use a mix of half-truths, pseudo- science, conspiration-theories and small handpicked bits and pieces of (in the overwhelming majority of cases long time outdated) real science in order to make others believe that creationism actually has some scientific background and should be recognized by real scientists as equal to science. Whenever those real scientists start laughing about such a proposal, the creationists get very angry and can not understand why their wild dogmas arent even recognized as valid scientific speculations. But the answer is very simple: In the creationists view science is something that sort of "drops down from heaven" and establishes accepted facts once and for all. Real science is nothing like that! Real science is all about asking questions, finding answers for those questions and then questioning the answers found and trying to find new questions based on the old questions and answers - SCIENCE IS A PROCESS! But since creationists are religous extremists they are not very fond of the idea of anyone questioning their answers.
Why is it impossible for creationistic dogma to be regarded as scientific speculation? Because scientific speculations must be both veryfiable and falsifyable! Let's take my little speculation about dromaeosaurid hunting behaviour as an example: Everybody could take it and conduct further studies of dromaeosaurid anatomy to see if it allowed for the type of behaviour I tried to describe. One could check wether the encephalisation quotient of these animals was possibly large enough to support such complex behaviour, wether the legs were strong enough to allow for the jumping, the joints were strong enough to support the stresses applied to them during the different movements and so on. After a while our "tester" would either conclude: "Yes, the results of my study confirm that Dromaeosauridae may have hunted in the manner you described" - "No, the results of my study show that this type of behaviour was impossible for those animals" or even " While my study supports some part of your speculation, it excludes others - further study is required". Creationist's "speculations" can be easily identified as religous dogma most of the time since a large part of them is based on the bible. For example: Creationists "speculate" that the earth is only 6000 years old because they counted all the numbers given in the bible together and ended up with 6000 years. While this can easily be falsified since modern dating methods confirm that the earth is very much older then 6000 years, it cannot be verified because there dont exist any "birth registers" or historical records one could study in order to confirm that two persons named "Adam and Eve" lived 6000 years ago and that they were the first human beings on this planet!
But how about evolution - dont even scientists themselves refer to it as "evolution theory"? Yes, they do! But the theory-part has nothing to do with the FACT that evolution was and is "happening", but rather that we do not understand all of it's mechanisms yet!! No real scientist will tell you that he questions the process of evolution in general. What scientists discuss is how it is actually happening and what mechanisms are involved in the process. "Gradual development" and "Punctuated equilibrium" are two of the main hypotheses how evolution may actually work. Creationists will use bits and pieces of very old scientific works (usually nothing younger then 40 years and mostly even much older!) in order to falsify evolution in general. But one can not hope to understand a part of science as complex as evolution without studying at least the majority of scientific publications released about that field so far, specially those which represent the latest works and are not older then a few years. Thats like hoping to understand a nuclear reactor by reading a few scrolls about alchemy written hundreds of years ago!
Before I come to an end, let me assure you: No human being ever lived on earth while the non-avian dinosaurs were around! The "tracks", the "cave-paintings", the "plesiosaur-remains" - they all are (sometimes even purposefully!) misinterpreted data, fakes and in the case of the "plesiosaur-remains", well those have been identified by real scientists as belonging to several shark-species (for example decomposed basking shark-remains) long time ago...

Torsten "TooTs" "DragonsClaw" van der Lubbe