Each of us carried water, a field notebook, lunch, a rock hammer and other hand tools. On a cool September morning in 2010 my crew and I began our daily descent from camp back into deep time, walking single file down a steep, knife-edge ridge of sandstone and mudstone in southern Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Critics doubted that so many large animals could have shared this relatively small chunk of land, however.īut over the past decade discoveries in southern Utah have bolstered the notion of distinct dinosaur communities in the north and south, revealing a host of species new to science-including many giant varieties.Įxactly what enabled so many behemoths to coexist in such a small area remains unclear, but it may be that dinosaurs had lower energy requirements than today’s large terrestrial animals do or that plants during the Late Cretaceous provided more food than their modern-day counterparts. In the 1980s a researcher proposed that distinct dinosaur communities inhabited the northern and southern regions of Laramidia for several million years.
Scientists refer to the western landmass as Laramidia. Between 90 million and 70 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous period, a shallow sea flooded the central region of North America, subdividing the continent into eastern and western landmasses.
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