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| 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.
