Number of Dinosaur and Bird Species

["Gary Bull" <GWinston@msn.com>]

Someone posted that: 
> There are almost 10,000 species of birds, but less than 200
> species of sauropods. Even fewer stegosaurs, ceratopians, etc.

Now bird species I can count.  Have a dozen or so species flying around the 
bird feeder in my yard.

Dinosaur species?   I don't know.  I've got some bones here, some bones there, 
some other bones scattered around Asia and Antartica, etc.  Unfortunately I 
have no dinosaurs to count, and, from what I can tell, only a lot of arguments 
about how many different dinosaur species use to be wandering around.

Even if we all could agree on the number of species the bones represent, how 
would we extrapolate that to estimate the actual number of different dinosaur 
species that originally existed.  It seems to me that what we have if a rather 
small, rather fragmented bone samples and no practical experience in using 
them to estimate the number of species when the bones were in their original 
factory packages.  (If I find six screws, two washers, a couple of electrical 
cords of different lengths,  and various odd knobs and dials, how do I the 
question on how many appliance models Maytag makes?)  Even if we thought we 
had a statistically sound method for the estimate, how would we test it for 
accuracy?

Believe we should have kept a control group.

Gary Bull
gwinston@msn.com