The Plesiosaur Directory wins the 2013 Golden Trilobite Award
The Golden Trilobite is awarded annually by the Palaeontological Association to “high quality amateur and institutional websites that promote the charitable aims of the Association”. I’ve no idea who nominated my website this year, but my thanks go to whoever raised it to the attention of the the PalAss Council, because it was a welcome surprise to learn that the Plesiosaur Directory was awarded the 2013 Golden Trilobite.
I’m obviously delighted and honoured for The Plesiosaur Directory to win this award, and I thank PalAss for recognising the site in this way. The Plesiosaur Directory started life as a small Geocities hosted site way back in June 2001, under the full title of “THE PLESIOSAUR DIRECTORY: A REVIEW OF THE SAUROPTERYGIA”. The site transferred to its own domain in March 2006 (plesiosauria.com), and remained in a basic html format until 2011, when I finally learned a bit of php and launched a new version of the site. This has been steep learning curve for someone with no training, and things are only going to get more difficult, as my next task is to convert The Plesiosaur Directory to a database driven site (at the moment only the plesiosaur bites blog is database driven), which will make it far easier to update and manage. The site has received other accolades in the past, such as when the journal ‘Science’ featured it in the “best of the Web in Science” (2006, Vol 313, Issue 5791, P.1211), so I suppose this means I must be doing something right.
However, these accolades remind me that there’s so much work left to do. Frankly, I’m not satisfied with the site as it stands, and I’m fully aware there are a great many genera missing from the directory, and numerous pages are rapidly becoming out of date as palaeontology marches on relentlessly. Some of the content hasn’t been updated since 2001, and was therefore written by a 20-year-old student version of myself. Back then, I could barely string together a coherent sentence. There are all sorts of reasons why I’ve let things slowly slip a little. However, this award will spur me on to upgrade the code, fill in those missing gaps, update the various galleries and pages, and write blog articles more frequently. There’s certainly no shortage of topics to cover.
The Plesiosaur Directory isn’t the only site dedicated to plesiosaurs. There are, in my opinion, other sites equally deserved of such an award. The Plesiosaur Site (plesiosaur.com), in particular, run by Richard Forrest, contains a wealth of data on plesiosaurs. Especially useful is the database containing information on plesiosaurian collections, distribution, taxonomy, and references. A major inspiration. Richard also hosted The Marine Reptiles Forum on plesiosaur.com until it was hacked earlier this year. We hope to get that back up and running soon.
For more information on the Golden Trilobite, including previous winners, see here.