John Pickrell, editor of Australian Geographic, photographed at the Australian Museum. Credit:Kristina Soljo/Australian Museum "The new species are weirder than anything movie producers have been able to devise." In the 26 years since Jurassic Park was released we have unearthed about 75 per cent of all known dinosaur species. And while the massive reptilian creatures have long since become extinct, rather than being wiped off the face of the earth, many of those feathered dinosaurs now roam the earth – and skies – as birds. Pickrell has been captivated by dinosaurs and natural history since he was a child. That fascination was cemented during his master's degree at the Natural History Museum in London where he was able to rummage through its fossil collection. "I spent a lot of the time behind the scenes looking at their incredible collections. They have more than a million specimens, including incredible fossils," he said.

Illustration: Matt Golding In 2014 he wrote his first book, Flying Dinosaurs, which traces our understanding of dinosaurs since the 1996 discovery in China of the first feathered dinosaur, sinosauropteryx. Now, as editor of Australian Geographic, Pickrell leads expeditions of amateur enthusiasts on digs in Mongolia, one of the many places in the world experiencing a renaissance in dinosaur discoveries. This is John Pickrell's second book on dinosaurs.

"In the past decade half of all dinosaur genera have been identified," Pickrell said. "In the past 18 months alone, three new species have been identified in Australia." . Across the world, Pickrell said, on average one new dinosaur species was being identified every week. Weird Dinosaurs is a tour de force through the latest digs across the planet. It features the amazing people unearthing new fossils and highlights the odd reptiles that roamed all corners of the earth millions of years ago. What the Jurassic Park movies did was inspire a new generation of palaeontologists to fan out across the planet. Fossilised remains are popping up at an exponential rate in South Africa, Antarctica, Alaska, Uzbekistan, Mongolia, Malawi and Australia.

"Until recently there were only 17 known dinosaur species in Australia," Pickrell said. "You can find more dinosaurs in a single quarry in China." Australia is an old and weathered continent, Pickrell said. The best places to find dinosaurs are elsewhere, where there have been uplifts and mountains formed recently. . Credit:Robert Smith/Australian Opal Centre But new methods in Australia are helping palaeontologists find more species. The hot spots in Australia, he said, are Winton in Queensland, Dinosaur Cove in Victoria and Lightning Ridge in NSW. There have been three species identified since 2014: savannasaurus, a herbivorous titanosaur; "lightning claw", a meat-eating megaraptorid; and kunbarrasaurus, an ankylosaur, a type of armoured dinosaur.

Weird Dinosaurs is published by Newsouth books and is available online or at bookshops. LIGHTNING CLAW Lightning Claw has yet to be formally identified. Credit:Julius Csotonyi Found in Lightning Ridge in western NSW, this as yet formally named species is a megaraptorid carnivore that hunted in Gondwana land 110 million years ago. Smaller than tyrannosaurus and more slender than allosaurus, at seven metres long, Lightning Claw is the largest meat-eating dinosaur yet discovered in Australia. Lightning Ridge is one of Australia's new hotspots for fossil-hunting, but with a twist. Many of the bones discovered here are preserved as opal.

SAVANNASAURUS Australia's very own titanosaur species, savannasaurs. Credit:David Elliott The discovery of this titanosaur on a farm near Winton, Queensland, is so recent it didn't even make it into Weird Dinosaurs. This wide-hipped herbivore was first uncovered in 2005 but not formally identified until October. Savannasaurus lived about 95 million years ago, reached as high as a giraffe and was about 15 metres long. DEINOCHEIRUS

Deinocheirus with its distinctive hump, pictured in swampland with an ankylosaur in background. Credit:Audrey Atuchin This dinosaur is just odd. It's the huge platypus of the late Cretaceous period about 70 million years ago. Deinocheirus wandered the wetlands of what is now Mongolia. In his book, Pickrell says it "looks something like a creature dreamed up for a Star Wars movie". At 2.4 metres, its arms are the longest arms of any two-legged creature, topped off with 30-centimetre long talons. It had a narrow head, a duck-like toothless bill, a huge tongue for sucking up vegetation. Pickrell says on Deinocheirus's back is a structure "somewhere between a sail and a camel's hump". NANUQSAURUS

Illustration of nanuqsaurus, from the late Cretaceous. Credit:With permission of Nathan Rogers This was a most likely feathered, warm-blooded pygmy tyrannosaur that lived in the northern polar regions. The head of a nanuqsaurus was found in Alaska in 2006, with the species identified in 2012. It was a relative of the famous T-rex. But where that huge monster was 12 metres long and weighed seven tonnes, nanuqsaurus was seven metres and probably only one tonne. YI QI The flying 'dino-bat' Yi qi. Credit:Emily Willoughby

This is a small flying dinosaur discovered in China. Yi-qui means "strange wing" and it certainly is. It was found by a farmer in 2007 but only identified in 2015. What had palaeontologists stumped was its long wrist bone unlike that in any other similar discoveries. It came to Xu Xing and his Canadian colleague Corwin Sullivan that a similar structure was also seen in flying squirrels. "We suddenly realised this was a really bizarre dinosaur with a kind of pterosaur – or bat-like wings," Sullivan told Pickrell. This "dino-bat" was described by one palaeontologist as "refreshingly weird". Indeed. New discoveries in a nutshell Three-quarters of all genera identified since 1990

50 new ceratopsian species since 2002 (relatives of triceratops)

150 discovered species in China since the early 1990s

40 titanosaurs found in South America

50 confirmed feathered species

A new species identified every week

Three new dinosaurs found in Australia since 2014.

Warm-blooded feathery polar dinosaurs, including a pygmy tyrannosaur

Dino-bats!