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What's wild about this is that it makes really obvious how limited our perspective on dinosaur biodiversity is. Our best view on the best-known dinosaurs comes
by InitialLastName 15d ago
What's wild about this is that it makes really obvious how limited our perspective on dinosaur biodiversity is. Our best view on the best-known dinosaurs comes from a few places that were really good for finding fossils from specific eras.
- shagie 14d agoYea... I mean... yea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stratigraphic_units_with_dinosaur_body_fossils https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stratigraphic_units_wi... And then you're using a bit of the west and Great Plains (Utah, Colorado, Montana, North Dakota) for all the different species that live in North America. And beyond that, the other dimension. Diplodocus was around for 10 million years give or take... 10 million years before the Anthropocene and you were in the Miocene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Miocene_mammals_of_North_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Miocene_mammals_of_No... We've only got snapshots of them in time - often from some disaster which aided in the formation of fossils... but all that other time, species evolved and went extinct without leaving a single identifiable fossil. (One of my families great roadtrips of my youth was out to Dinosaur National Monument during a sibling's dinosaur phase... and it was neat. I was there on a road trip of my own in '09, but it hadn't reopened yet... someday I'll get back out there again.)