Philippa Stevenson: Dinosaurs and friends on a website near you

Dinosaurs are a perennial favourite with the kids and, considering the popularity of the movie Jurassic Park, with many adults as well.

Again this year - coincidentally just in time for Christmas - a shiny, new, dinosaur-like toy is on the market.

But while dinosaurs stalked the planet for longer than just about anything else in Earth's 4600-million-year history, how much do most of us know about other eons, eras, periods and epochs with which scientists delineate the vast passage of time?

Yes, there is the Jurassic period but there are also the equally interesting-sounding Triassic, Pennsylvanian, Silurian, Ordovician and the ginormous Precambrian.

That last one makes up 87 per cent of the entire geologic timescale, but what do any of us know about the planet then or what lived, slid, slithered or sat round trimming its toenails?

Millions of years are all a bit much to take in, really. So try substituting dollars for years. If you had $1 for every one of the millions of years the planet's thought to have been around, your bank account would contain 4600 million smackeroos.

If you had $1 for every year of the Jurassic period, you'd be a relative pauper - just $54 million.

We'll skip over what it might say about me, but somehow thinking in dollars rather than years gave me a much better perspective about the scale of things.

The idea of tapping into what we non-scientific types are more familiar with to aid our understanding came from Penny Cooke, one half of a dynamic duo who last week were named Science Communicators of the Year by the New Zealand Association of Scientists.

The other science-selling supremo is Alison Campbell and both doctorate-toting women are from Waikato University's science and engineering school.

Campbell is a biological sciences lecturer and Cooke is an earth sciences research fellow.

That's their day jobs. At night-time they have organised the enormously successful Cafe Scientifique, which serves up a dollop of science in chatty language in a comfy cafe.

What started in a Hamilton bar has spread to Tauranga and is planned for Auckland.

The enthusiastic and irrepressible Campbell and Cooke get round a good many secondary schools to talk science, too, and it's there that they got the idea for another extra-curricula activity - a website providing an easily understood, comprehensive guide to evolution. Or life on Earth but not as most of us know it from the shopping mall.

In August 2003, with colleagues Kathrin Cass and Kerry Earl, the pair responded to a request from high school science teachers for a website with New Zealand examples and information that would enable them to teach evolution with accurate, clear and relevant scientific information.

The easy-read scientific treasure trove draws on the latest findings of scientists in New Zealand and round the world.

It has become much more than simply an e-textbook for school students. University lecturers also use it as a teaching resource and, with more than 3.5 million hits since the website went live in March last year, it's well-known beyond New Zealand.

That you, me, mom and pop can increase our knowledge on anything from the Devonian period to Darwin suits Cooke and Campbell right down to the fossil-laden sediment they are so fond of.

"The school science curriculum needs a new approach," Cooke said. "The focus is to get students to university but most people don't go there.

"Science is a much more dominant component of our lives now, whether we need to know about pharmacology or alternative energy.

"There is a need for people who've left school to continue learning," she said.

When we consider some of the issues we discuss almost daily - climate change, genetic engineering, immunisation, oil depletion, alternate energy, bird flu - there seems little doubt that the school science we struggled to learn 10, 20, 30, 40 or more years ago is going to be little help to us.

It may be time to broaden our fascination with life in the past beyond dinosaurs, with or without remote control.

Thanks to Cooke and Campbell, a useful portal is now just a click of a mouse away.