Gordon Wrigley asked me to write the third edition of Coconuts for Longman in 1986, Reg Child, and later his wife Frances, very generously lent me the notes and reference material of his first two editions and the Librarians at Reading University and the Radcliffe Science Library kindly gave me access to their collections of Child memorabilia. It was on the strength of this planned rewriting that Dick Pieris spontaneously gave me virtually all of the coconut related documents that he had accumulated and, in particular, the two bound volumes of the typed carbon copy of 4,000 bibliographic references to coconut dating back to 600AD that the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux had declined to publish when he offered it to them in 1978. It soon became clear to me that I do not possess the temperament required to write a textbook. My respect is great for my contemporaries like Jan Ohler, Dave Romney, Gabrielle de Taffin, 'PK' Thampan and Mike Foale who have all written or edited entire coconut books. Other people also willingly gave me unrestricted access to their own collected references, most notably Bernard Zelazny, Peter Maddison, Dennis Johnson and Reginald Griffith; and many others gave me encouragement. Thanks are also due to Adigilson Silva, who drew my attention to the comprehensive, on-line database maintained by EMBRAPA. So, for the benefit of any future coconut text book writers, and for coconut researchers generally, and for the interested layman, I have begun to transfer as much as possible of my own coconut references, along with those mentioned above, to a freely accessible internet web site. The main pages will attempt to be selective for 'key' events and I make no excuse that they reflect my own particular interests. The subsidiary lists for individual years will contain, if possible, every reference for any particular year and, of course, links to current internet sites on coconut. There is even a “lost & found” page for incomplete citations. Unlike a textbook, which is unavoidably out-of-date as soon as it is published, the Coconut Time Line will never become out-of-date because it will never be finished.