Searching Dinograph
Type anything into the box at the top of the page. Most of the time you should just type a name and pick the result — everything below is for when you want to be precise.
Three ways to find something
Every search runs three ways at once, and the results are merged.
By name. Exact and partial matches on the genus, the species name and the
clade. Three letters is enough — ste already finds Stegosaurus, veloc
finds Velociraptor.
By the fossil web. Species connected to your matches — ones that shared a period, a clade, or a predator-prey relationship. These are marked related in the results, so you can tell them from direct hits.
By description. You can describe a dinosaur instead of naming it. “Meat eater” finds carnivores, “small armoured herbivore” finds what it says, and neither phrase appears literally in the data. This leg takes a few seconds to come online after a quiet spell — the box will tell you when it is still warming up.
Operators
| You type | You get |
|---|---|
stegosaurus | the ordinary search described above |
-feathered | exclude anything matching feathered |
+theropoda | require theropoda — results without it are dropped |
"late cretaceous" | that exact phrase, words adjacent and in order |
clade:theropoda | restrict the match to one field |
AND OR NOT | combine terms — uppercase only |
Fields you can name: name, binomial, aliases, clade, period,
description. A value with a space in it needs quotes —
period:"Late Cretaceous".
When a query uses any of these, the dropdown shows how it was read, so
t -rex tells you plainly that it means t NOT rex. Operators are tinted in
the search box as you type, which is how you can tell a live one from a
character that is just part of a word.
Why t-rex is not an exclusion
- means “exclude”, so t-rex could be read as “t, but not rex” — which would
hide every Tyrannosaurus, the opposite of what anyone typing it wants.
So position decides. An operator only counts where it sits in front of a term:
| You type | How it reads |
|---|---|
t-rex | inside a word — punctuation, searched as t rex |
T - rex | floating on its own — ignored, searched as T rex |
t -rex | in front of a term — a real exclusion, t NOT rex |
The same goes for the other operators. A stray ?, *, . or : in the
middle of what you typed is treated as a space rather than as syntax, so
what is a t-rex? searches for what it looks like it searches for.
If you get nothing back
Spelling has to be close. The name search matches on letter sequences, so a
missing letter in the middle of a long name — tyranosaurus for
Tyrannosaurus — can miss entirely. Try fewer letters: tyran is enough, and
short prefixes are more forgiving than long misspellings.
Failing that, describe the animal instead of naming it. The description leg does not care about spelling at all.