Favorite Food: Whatever I’m consuming at the moment; particular weaknesses for Russian, Greek, pizza

Family: Andrea (wife), Adam (son), Nike (dog)

Genus:Deinogeorgius

Species: immanis (don’t worry--I don’t get it, either)

Place of Origin: Postwar Germany, but raised in Buffalo, NY, USA

Habitat:San Diego, California

Favorite Movie:It’s a Gift (starring W. C. Fields); most other Fields movies, all 13 canonical Marx Brothers movies; Forbidden Planet; Beast from 20,000 Fathoms; modern no-plot SFX monster flicks; after these comes a host of others too numerous to list

Favorite TV Show: now = 3rd Rock from the Sun (this and Simpsons remain the only two network shows I’ll watch anymore); news channels, movie channels, and the occasional Biography  then = Jeopardy (finally went cold turkey on this addiction this past May); Twilight Zone (original)

Favorite Dinosaur:Any of the 827 named genera, though particularly partial to spiky stegosaurs

Favorite Sport:Billiards (to watch as well as play), archery (haven’t done either in years, though--lack of time)

Exercise:Walking Nike; transporting endless quantities of heavy boxes (25-30 kg) of dinosaur books between garage and house

Hobbies: Staying alive (on motorcycle); polyhedron modelmaking and trying to visualize 4D objects; chess; philately; classical music; spotting and determining names of minor actors (such as Herb Vigran, Mary Wickes, Jay C. Flippen, Parley Baer) in old 1940s and 1950s movies; Marvel comic collecting and science fiction (once upon a time...)

Distinguishing Features: Known to drop everything for hours on end to work on problem of four-dimensional nonconvex uniform polytopes

phylogeny - (say fy laj eh nee) the evolution or history of a group of animals that are related. Nothing to do with "Fee Phy Fo Fum."

bipedal - (say bi peed ul) Not bicycle, students. That means two wheels. This means two legs. Just like you and me.

aficionados - (say uh-fish-she-uh- nah-does) - a long word meaning "fan" which is a short word for fanatic. It is someone who likes something a lot, but still does their homework, gets good grades and still has time for comic books, Nintendo and knitting.. Like me, Vera

Students? Pay Attention! Be sure to check out that is to say, investigate, (humph), certain other useful pieces of terminology at the 7V-WOW Archives.

In 1963, Dinogeorge’s parents were most relieved to drop him off at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There, after the usual four years, he acquired a B.Sc. degree in mathematics. Pursuing a non-dinosaurian interest in four-dimensional geometry, he became a postgraduate math student at the University of Toronto in Canada, and, after knocking around a bit, he earned an M.Sc. in 1970. His dissertation described a computer program for generating motion pictures of four-dimensional objects passing through our three-dimensional space. Among the movies thus created were the first ever done for all six convex regular 4D polytopes (of which the tesseract, or 4D hypercube, is one). They were publicly shown at the "Shaping Space" geometry conference at Smith College in 1984. 

Dinogeorge spent eight more years at Toronto working as a programmer for the university’s Computer Centre, preparing a doctoral dissertation, creating computer art and running computer art shows, and collecting Marvel Comics. The comics won out and the computer career was abandoned after he went into business publishing the Marvel Comics Index for other Marvel collectors. A dedicated Marvel collector, Dinogeorge had by 1977 assembled the world’s only complete (that’s every issue) collection of Marvel superhero comics that began with Marvel Comics #1, October/November 1939 (not just Fantastic Four #1). 

 At the same time, Dinogeorge had read everything he could find on dinosaurs in the MIT library, and after moving to Toronto he became a habitué of the Royal Ontario Museum library. There he met David Weishampel, then a paleontology graduate student working on hadrosaur anatomy, who in 1978 recommended him for membership in the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. Photocopying machines were becoming generally available at about this time, so Dinogeorge began building a personal reference library of photocopied dinosaur papers alongside his Marvel Comics collection. His accumulation of dinosaur books, journals, offprints, papers, and photocopies now weighs several tons and comprises about 75% of the world’s non-juvenile dinosaur literature. 

As a self-publisher, Dinogeorge used his resources to produce several small-press-run publications for dinosaur aficionados, beginning in 1978 with Mesozoic Meanderings #1, a complete table of dinosaur species names, organized systematically. He spent three weeks during the summers of 1979 and 1980 as a volunteer for Phil Currie in Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta, Canada, where he helped to excavate a Centrosaurus bonebed, several hadrosaurs, and a pretty specimen of Chirostenotes. This was followed in subsequent years by several more dinosaurian self-publications, as well as work for Dinamation International editing one of their book projects in 1988 and 1989 after the Marvel Index project came to a close. 

In 1979, Dinogeorge moved to San Diego, California to be close to the world-famous San Diego Comic-Con and to have good weather year-round for motorcycling. There, in 1980, he met Andrea Matyas, a Buffalo native and a freelance editor by profession; they married in 1982 and remain happily so to date. 

In the 1990s, while trying to comprehend dinosaur phylogeny, Dinogeorge realized that the two competing versions of the evolution of flight in birds were both fundamentally flawed: Dinosaur paleontologists see birds as theropod dinosaurs that evolved flight from the ground up, having been bipedal, ground-dwelling runners before becoming fliers. Paleornithologists, on the other hand, consider this impossible. They see birds as having evolved from tree-dwelling archosaurs unrelated to dinosaurs, and they dismiss the strong anatomical similarities between theropods and birds as coincidental rather than the result of a close evolutionary relationship. In the first two printings of Mesozoic Meanderings #2, however, Dinogeorge argued that the large, flightless theropod dinosaurs evolved from various kinds of small, tree-dwelling, probably feathered "dino-birds" that were also the ancestors of birds. That is, dinosaurs could fly (after a fashion) before they could walk. Wife Andrea called this the BCF theory, for "birds came first." 

Dinogeorge presently works as a freelance editor and indexer, and writes about dinosaurs or anything else when the occasion arises. His latest dinosaur articles appeared as an eleven-issue series in the Japanese magazine Dino-Frontline from 1993 to 1996, all illustrated by longtime friend and dinosaur artist Tracy Ford. He also wrote an abrasive popular account of BCF theory for the June 1994 issue of Omni. Whatever he knows about dinosaurs he learned by reading scholarly papers, by visiting museum collections around North America, and by corresponding with most of the world’s professional dinosaurologists -- that is, through amateurish love of dinosaurs, not by the tiresome route of courses and curricula. More than four years of family health problems have kept him from producing his own dinosaur publications, but these are now largely resolved, and he is looking forward to restarting those publications -- in particular, the massive third edition of Mesozoic Meanderings #2, further installments of The Dinosaur Folios -- and initiating a giant new Internet project in the near future. 

Dinogeorge maintains three Web sites, one for dinosaurs and two for geometry, at

http://members.aol.com/Dinogeorge/index.html
http://members.aol.com/Polycell/index.html
http://members/aol.com/Polycell/uniform.html