Day 7: Duck Bill Extravaganza!

 

Today we continued prospecting in the badlands of the Almond Formation and made several more wonderful discoveries. Early in the day we located a thin band of ironstone which produced interesting fragments of dinosaur and other reptile bone. Later we explored a new section of outcrop for the first time and very quickly located the skeleton of an extraordinarily large hadrosaurid dinosaur. We seem to be finding a lot of these duck billed dinosaurs, as they were very common in the Late Cretaceous. A few million years after the age of the Almond Formation dinosaurs, when Tyrannosaurus rex lived, the most common dinosaurs by far were Triceratops, the famous horned ceratopsian. Meanwhile the hadrosaurid from that time, Edmontosaurus, was common but substantially less so than Triceratops. In the Almond we see the reverse of that pattern. Hadrosaurids clearly dominated this fauna, or at least they inhabited environments more conducive to fossilization at the time. The Almond is the gift that keeps on giving, proving that that there are many loose paleontological ends that still need tying in the western interior of North America.