Wednesday, May 24, 2017

The Long, Complicated History of Appalachian Ceratopsians

North America during the Campanian
The title is a joke. Finding ceratopsian remains east of Texas is an incredibly recent phenomenon. Oh sure, there are plenty of (fragmentary) dinosaurs known from the eastern half of the United States, but those taxa tend to be tyrannosauroids, nodosaurs, ornithomimids, and hadrosaurs. I should mention at this point that, during much of the Late Cretaceous, North America was cleaved into three islands by the presence of a shallow interior sea called the Western Interior Seaway (WIS): Laramidia to the west, Nunavut to the north, and Appalachia to the east. Laramidia’s eastern north-south shoreline is where we get most of North America’s dinosaurs—Alberta, Montana, Utah, and (to a lesser extent) Texas are all hotbeds of dinosaur action, and that includes ceratopsians.