Any good scientist will admit their own ignorance is virtually boundless. Our lack of knowledge is what drives us to discover more. Many of these fields are in a state of flux; for instance dinosaur phylogeny is in a state of constant revision and will be for centuries to come at least, and that's one tiny discipline in the world of science. For science only works if minds are open to change and the shifting of paradigms; it's one of the things that makes science so exciting.

That's what I meant in my post of 07 Nov 12 - 02:12 PM. "Palaeontology rocks": I like it! Must invent one of those for botany. I did a two-week palaeobotany course at university and I wished I'd done my whole degree in it. In those days no-one demurred if you went around hacking lumps of rock from sensitive sites. I had a lovely collection of plant fossils from the Jurassic of the Yorkshire coast, then someone nicked the lot from my lab locker, along with my geological hammer. Swines!