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Extinct Animal Questions
Topic Started: Nov 26 2013, 10:24 PM (193,345 Views)
MightyFan217
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OH YESSS!

A bit unrelated to the topic, but does anybody know any good Paleoartists who specialize in Cenozoic Mammals?
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babehunter1324
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Mauricio Anton.

There's also Jagroar in DeviantArt,


Not spam.
Edited by babehunter1324, Oct 28 2015, 09:22 AM.
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Consultant
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Hello everyone, I'm doing a research paper for the biodiversity of the Hell Creek formation, which doesn't have to be too specific for a English class, but I would like some good sources for my paper. I can trust you guys, but I'd also like to get information from certain other websites to make it seem more credible.
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BossMan, Jake
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Son of God

Wikipedia nuff said mate
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Acinonyx Jubatus
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I AM THE UNSHRINKWRAPPER!

BossMan, Jake
Oct 30 2015, 03:59 PM
Wikipedia nuff said mate
Except that wikipedia is NEVER accepted as a credible reference for high school or university projects.
Edited by Acinonyx Jubatus, Oct 30 2015, 04:13 PM.
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CyborgDino
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True, but Wikipedia cites all their sources. If you don't want to trust Wikipedia, you can just use the sources it provides.
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babehunter1324
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Add Dakotaraptor to the list.

:D
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BossMan, Jake
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Son of God

In many Cretaceous documentaries we see dinosaurs like Trex or Giganotosaurus living in barren ash "wastelands" with greyish black volcanic rocks and pine like conifers. Was this accurate for thier habitats or was most if the late Cretaceous this habitat or similar
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I Raptus
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What are ya lookin' at?

As much as I like WWD's rendition for Hell Creek, it isn't very accurate. AFAIK more or less imagine a mix of Central Florida, Louisiana, and Southern Japan for it. :)
Edited by I Raptus, Oct 31 2015, 07:46 PM.
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CyborgIguana
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Hell Creek was actually FAR from a wasteland, it was a lush semi-forested floodplain IIRC. Documentaries just like to portray it as a wasteland to drive home the point that it existed "close to the end".
Edited by CyborgIguana, Oct 31 2015, 08:43 PM.
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Incinerox
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BossMan, Jake
Oct 31 2015, 07:41 PM
In many Cretaceous documentaries we see dinosaurs like Trex or Giganotosaurus living in barren ash "wastelands" with greyish black volcanic rocks and pine like conifers. Was this accurate for thier habitats or was most if the late Cretaceous this habitat or similar
While it wasn't exactly a volcanic wasteland, Gondwana, especially South America, still had their share of araucarias (monkey puzzles) and whatnot while they were being replaced by flowering plants in Laurasian continents. Some even suggest that the whole reason why many monkey puzzle species are shaped the way they are today (really tall, crown of pine-like needles, big spiky fruit) are precisely because of the giant sauropods that lived in South America. An arms race very similar to that between giraffes and acacia trees.

So you'd very much be able to at least get away with filming a Giganotosaurus scene in Conguillio National Park instead of a T. rex, which is where they filmed Hell Creek back in WWD (it's a beautiful place and I really wanna go there).

To be fair on the film teams, they were fairly constrained by the fact they were tasked at filming at locations specifically without grass. And that's fairly difficult to do. I mean, if we give the whole series a run through:

Ep. 1 - New blood:
Filmed at New Caledonia. No obvious grass cover, red, sandstone dirt, cycads and tall araucarias everywhere, very dry and scrubby (on that part of the island anyway), it actually lines up pretty neatly from what we know of the Chinle Formation (which underlays the Kayenta Formation, which was even drier and would one day just become a giant dust bowl of sand and nothingness, but I digress).

Ep. 2 - Time of Titans
Filmed in several places, including California's Redwood National Park, Conguillio National Park, and I think some parts of Tasmania. Again, the combined plant types of the locations matched pretty nicely with what we know of Morrison - Sequoias, Araucarias, fern plains, very distinct wet/dry seasons (as we see in the Allosaurus special). So kudos to them for getting that right too.

Ep. 3 - Cruel Sea
We have almost nothing in terms of flora here, but an extensive marine record. We know enough to say the area was a shallow sea with extensive coral reefs and small islands with not much on them. They reused New Caledonia for this part because of it's prehistoric look. Whether or not that's accurate is unknown. Again, they dodged the grass problem.

Ep. 4 - Giant of the Skies
I don't know if those pillars the Tapejara were perched on were a thing back in the Cretaceous. I do know their biggest failing there was putting Tapejara on a cliff face being seabirds like every other pterosaur in pop culture. Moving on, they filmed in New Zealand for the "Iguanodon" beach scene (I think those were Dollodon, I'll have to double check). New Zealand's great coz most of its forests have been around non-stop for 150 million years anyway. Whether or not that lined up with that particular scene, I doubt it, but in their next episode, it was PERFECT. Even more interestingly was that, even though they claimed Utahraptor and what we now know to be Hippodraco were European, the location in Tasmania they used would have been PERFECT for Cedar Mountain Formation where they ACTUALLY came from, right down to the genus of pines the Hippodraco were munching on. Good on them there.

Ep. 5 - Spirits of the Ice Forest
They filmed in New Zealand. The forests they used would have been identical to those Leaellynasaura lived in. You cannot get any better film locations for that episode. All their errors were on the basis that we have almost nothing on animal data (polar "allosaur", my arse).

Ep. 6 - Death of a Dynasty
And now we're back to the question. Filming at Conguillio National Park? There are parts of the place which line up decently with T. rex habitat but the volcanic wastelands and geothermal springs weren't really THE places to use. Prehistoric Park actually got some of their scenes right. Like, any of you remember the scene where Nigel's trying to catch that Ornithomimus like it was an emu, then encounters 3 really angry T. rex? They were surrounded by southern beech (which actually DID exist in Cretaceous Gondwana), which is a step closer to the beech forests of Hell Creek, but would have been even better for the Giganotosaurus episode of the WWD specials.

Talking of specials:
Special - Chased by Dinosaurs:
Well, they did ALRIGHT here. The Giganotosaurus episode was filmed in Tenerife, where they had some cool scattered pine forests with clouds and stuff, but ironically they'd have been better off filming THIS episode at Conguillio National Park. Though the Therizinosaurus episode was a mess in terms of filming and anachronisms. They filmed this episode at Fraser Island because it's one of the few places in the world where there's a successful forest ecosystem on an entirely sandy substrate (with dunes and stuff). They seemed to be a bit lenient on their rule about grass as well. Though the mess here is that they've confused two drastically different ecosystems with one big one. Notably the unusual merging of a very mild and diverse Nemegt Formation (where Therizinosaurus, Tarbosaurus and Saurolophus come from) and very arid Djadochta Formation (Velociraptor and Protoceratops), which were similar locations, but Nemegt was distinctly younger (it overlies Djadochta and is about 1-5 million years younger). Had they caught this error before filming, they might not need to depend on Fraser Island which doesn't really have a very good array of Cretaceous flora. However, based on our little data on the plant matter in Nemegt, we have enough to say that it was mild, and had dense Araucaria woodlands with rivers lakes and mudflats...

... Much like Conguillio National Park...

Only less snow capped peaks in the background.

...

ANYWAY.

The answer is no, the grayish black rocks are distinctly volcanic in origin, so those'd only apply to areas in the Cretaceous where volcanoes are present (in the same way it applies to our world). As for these pine like conifers, it was accurate for several places in the Cretaceous but by no means all of them. They were in decline in the Northern Hemisphere and were almost gone entirely from Laramidia by the time T. rex showed up. Nemegt had a fairly large number of them despite the decline, and they were pretty stable in Gondwana right up until the ice ages. Now they're only native to small pockets of Patagonia, some South Pacific Islands, small parts of eastern 'Straya and South East Asia.

Antarctica would have been loaded with them and redwoods until it just froze over entirely.
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CyborgIguana
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How well did they do in terms of WWM and WWB, I wonder (obviously the modern pine trees seen in the Hynerpeton segment of WWM were all kinds of wrong, but aside from that).
Edited by CyborgIguana, Nov 1 2015, 05:06 PM.
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Acinonyx Jubatus
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Does anyone have a good description of the flora of the Kayenta formation? Also, where can I find the most accurate depiction of Megapnosaurus' skull? All the ones I found on google images seem to conflict.
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BossAggron
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Formerly Dilophoraptor

I think your problem with Megapnosaurus is that it's now classified under Coelophysis rhodesiensis and/or C. kayentakatae, so you're probably getting those two.

This might help though
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Incinerox
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Acinonyx Jubatus
Nov 1 2015, 05:25 PM
Does anyone have a good description of the flora of the Kayenta formation? Also, where can I find the most accurate depiction of Megapnosaurus' skull? All the ones I found on google images seem to conflict.
So the good news, is I've spent a good while researching this very subject.

The bad news is our floral record from Kayenta isn't great. It's rubbish actually. EVEN SO, I can tell you to some vague degree what existed there:
Cycads
Horsetails
Matonia
Welwitschia
Gleichenia
Brachyphyllum
Pagiophyllum
Zamites
Williamsonia
Otozamites
Ptilophyllum


Google and wikipedia should help you fill in the details from there.

The area itself was a sandstone landscape, very dry throughout the year with a short wet season during the summer. Braided streams everywhere flowing southwest from the Colorado Plateau, through Kayenta, and westward to the sea. To the north was a giant dustbowl of sand and misery which would one day expand southward completely engulf Kayenta entirely and form the Navajo Standstone of today (at which point it would be the biggest dune range EVER).

As for "Megapnosaurus", we now know it to be Coelophysis kayentakatae, and it looked like this (granted, this is a Coelophysis rhodesiensis skeletal from Greg Paul's book, with the accompanying C. kayentakatae skull shopped onto it):
Posted Image

EDIT: Hang on, I seem to have forgotten to erase the C. rhodesiensis skull from under the C. kayentakatae skull in the top view. Will fix shortly.

EDIT 2: FIXED.
Edited by Incinerox, Nov 1 2015, 06:38 PM.
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