Fossil Wiki:References

Primary References
The best source for accurate information on paleontology related topics is the primary literature, where original research is published. After you get a basic feel for the terminology, it becomes possible to learn by immersion by reading articles and trying to piece together what the authors are saying. A big problem, however, is access. Finding a copy of a journal can be difficult, and making copies can really add up. Subscriptions are usually obscenely expensive because most of these journals have pretty low circulation. So how do you get a hold of technical papers?

Most scientific journals now offer PDFs of their articles online. Unfortunately, you are usually required to subscribe to the journal, pay a bunch of money, or go to a library that subscribes to the journal in order to access them. If you do live near a university or public library, it is not a bad idea to find out what journals they subscribe to and then spend a few hours in the library downloading PDF files and emailing them to yourself... it's a lot cheaper than making copies. However, if you don't have that kind of time or don't live near a major library, there are still a lot of places to find papers online for free, which some of you may already know about. But I'll list some of the ones I know about here:


 * The American Museum of Natural History Digital Library provides free PDF copies of all four of their major publications. They are working to have every single issue from beginning to end. Many new dinosaurs have been reported in American Museum Novitates in particular.
 * The Polish journal Acta Paleontologica Polonica also provides free PDF access to all issues dating back to 1997 on their website. Although the journal is Polish, all articles are in English.
 * The French journal Geodiversitas commonly publishes paleontology articles. The website provides free PDF copies of all articles back to the beginning of 2000.
 * A special edition of the Portuguese journal Gaia was released in 2000, although all the articles date from 1998. These articles are available for free online in PDF format.
 * Science, perhaps the most prestigious American science journal, now allows free web access to all research articles more than 12 months old, to anyone who registers on their website (and is willing to receive a few emails). Articles are in PDF format and date back to 1997.
 * The Royal Society of London is a scientific organization that publishes several journals. All articles in all journals are made freely available online in PDF format twelve months after publication. Of these journals, dinosaur articles are most commonly published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
 * The British journal Palaeontology has PDFs available from 1957 to 2000 here (1999 and 2000 send you to Synergy, but it's still free).
 * The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is a journal published by the United States federal government, so all articles are freely available as PDFs on their website (better be since it's paid for by tax dollars!).
 * Many of the journals in Oxford Journals' life sciences series are free.
 * All of PloS One's articles are free.
 * If you go to the online archives of many major journals, some provide a few PDFs as samples, usually of more recent issues. Digging through these sites is also a way to net the occasional free article.

Where an article is available for free on e.g. the author's web site as well as via subscription at the journal's site, Google Scholar links to the free version in bold letters to the right of the journal link.

In many cases you can get the "nuggets" from the abstracts of journal articles, which are generally free. Instead of abstracts, some subscription sites present the first pages of articles as free samples, and these usually contain the abstract and the first few paragraphs. Notable examples are journals published by Springer and the archive of pre-electronic articles at JSTOR. JSTOR's collection includes artciles from the Journal of Paleontology, and a Google search for an article in the Journal of Paleontology will link to the first page and abstract at JSTOR, as in this example.

Individual Researchers

 * Ken Carpenter of the Denver Museum of Natural Sciences has most of his papers online at his webpage. Some, but not all, are just PDFs of photocopies, the downsides of which are that quality is not that great sometimes, and they are not searchable by text, but it's definitely better than nothing.
 * Phil Currie has many of his papers from 2004 and before at this site.
 * American paleontologist Jerry D. Harris has PDFs of a number of his publications available for free at his website, as well as a page of links to many, many journals. As of June 2006, his website also features the entire Proceedings of the 2006 Goseong International Dinosaur Symposium. This series of papers was originally published in an out-of-print edition of the Journal of the Paleontological Society of Korea but are now made freely available in PDF format.
 * Sunny Hwang of the AMNH has a few theropod papers linked on her online CV.
 * Matt Wedel, Randy Irmis, and Mike Taylor have prepared PDFs of many of O. C. Marsh's papers, at O. C. Marsh Papers. These are all in the public domain, and so also are great sources for images such as historical skeletal reconstructions and elements of anatomy.
 * The Lusodinos site, run by Portuguese paleontologist Octavio Mateus, has PDF copies of many of his papers, which usually involve Portuguese fossils.
 * Several papers authored by Robert Sullivan of the State Museum of Pennsylvania are available in PDF format on his personal website.
 * Jeffrey Wilson has some of his publications as PDFs at his website.
 * Lawrence Witmer of Ohio University includes a list of his publications on his faculty page, some of which are available in PDF format.

Other Sites

 * This site has free web access to recent issues of a lot of journals. Right now they only have the 2006 issues of Ameghiniana, a very important journal from Argentina, but hopefully in the future they will add more. The Revista Geologica de Chile has some articles online as well, back to 1997. Not too many dinosaur papers in this one, although here is the description of Rinconsaurus. Both of these journals are only available in HTML format, not PDF, which means you can't reference specific page numbers, but all the text and figures are there.
 * This site has issues of Paleobiology and Journal of Paleontology archived online, but apparently they are not in PDF format, and don't provide any figures.
 * Not all articles are in English, so The Polyglot Paleontologist can be very useful to English speakers. Free online English translations of many papers originally written in Spanish, Chinese, Russian and French are available, many in PDF format. However, sometimes there are no images, and because they are not the original copy, you can't reference the original page numbers.
 * This class site offers several classics on a wide variety of dinosaurian topics. It's been up since 2004, but at some point, the plug may be pulled.
 * Matt Wedel, at Ask Dr. Vector, maintains links to free PDF sources on the right sidebar.

I'm sure other people know of other places to get articles. Please add them to the appropriate section above, as long as they are legal. Google searches or searching for "pdf" on the Archives of the Dinosaur Mailing List might also nab you some more.

Finally, if you really want the paper or PDF badly enough, ask someone for it politely. Methods include writing to the lead author of the paper (who is usually happy for the recognition) or using the Dinosaur Mailing List to ask. Having a friend who is attending a major university is also helpful.

Good non-primary sites (technical)
The following sites provide some scholarly information on dinosaurs, but are not primary sources. Most are actually tertiary sources, so information may or may not always be complete, current, and/or accurate.

Click here for English translation ]]
 * Dinosaur Mailing List archives
 * DinoData
 * The Dinosauria On-Line
 * T. Mike Keesey's Dinosauricon
 * Mickey Mortimer's Theropod Database
 * George Olshevsky's Dinosaur Genera List
 * Palaeos vertebrates on dinosaurs Also provides overviews and references that are similar in standard to Wikipedia's, so it's often a good starting point.
 * German page describing almost all known prehistoric reptiles (with all dinosaurs)
 * A second german page describing all known dinosaurs (and some pterosaurs, early birds and marine animals)