Dinosaur habitat preferences in Upper Cretaceous of south-western Europe (free pdf)
Ben Creisler
Bernat Josep Vázquez López, Albert Sellés, Albert Prieto-Márquez & Bernat Vila (2025)
Habitat preference of the dinosaurs from the Ibero-Armorican domain (Upper Cretaceous, south-western Europe)
Swiss Journal of Palaeontology 144: 4
doi: https://doi.org/10.1186/s13358-024-00346-1
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13358-024-00346-1
Paleoenvironmental preferences for Cretaceous dinosaurs at a regional scale have been mainly assessed in North America. In south-western Europe, the dinosaur-bearing formations ranging the late Campanian to the latest Maastrichtian encompass coastal and lowland environments that produced hundreds of fossil localities with evidence of titanosaurian sauropods, maniraptoran and abelisauroid theropods, and nodosaurid ankylosaurs, together with rhabdodontid and hadrosauroid ornithopods. In order to study environmental associations of dinosaur taxa, we have revised, updated, and expanded upon an existing database that compiles the occurrence and minimum number of individuals for the dinosaur-bearing formations spanning the upper Campanian to the uppermost Maastrichtian of South-Western Europe. Based on this database, the habitat preferences of dinosaur groups in the region were determined by means of statistical tests of independence. All chi-square tests showed positive, mostly moderate-to-strong, and statistically significant associations between the studied groups and the environment they inhabited. The analysis of the residuals indicated that most dinosaur groups preferred lowland environments (including, contrary to previous studies, nodosaurids). The only exception were abelisauroids, which showed no habitat preference. Our results concur with recent works indicating that titanosaur sauropods and hadrosauroids preferred inland environments but clearly disagree with others suggesting that the latter as well as nodosaurid ankylosaurs were positively associated with marine or coastal settings. Considering the changes in occurrence distribution throughout the Maastrichtian turnover in the region, both titanosaurians and nodosaurids probably established a feeding strategy-based niche partitioning with ornithopods, although additional data is required to confidently confirm this relationship.
Gregory Paul
Deinonychus47
On Wednesday, January 15, 2025, 6:25 PM, 'Gregory Paul' via Dinosaur Mailing Group <DinosaurMa...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
Does anyone know the specimen # for the Houston Museum of Natural Science display Stegosaurus?GSPaul
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Gregory Paul
Russell Engelman
Scott Hartman
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Teaching Faculty III
Richard W. Travsky
Curious now since I live in Wyoming and have been in the museum many times. The one in Laramie does not have a nickname that I’m aware of. Sarah/Sophie is a different find. Sophie was found in 2003
https://www.geowyo.com/shell-dinosaur-bone-beds.html
“Bob Simon, a retired Chevron petroleum geologist, opened a private commercial quarry about two miles south of the Howe Quarry along Red Canyon Creek drainage. In 2003 his team discovered a nearly complete stegosaur skeleton in the NE NW Section 28, Township 54 North, and Range 91 West. Kirby Siber’s Saurier Museum team helped with the excavation and preparation of specimen. The stegosaurus was named “Sarah” after the ranch owner’s daughter. “Sarah,” renamed “Sophie,” is on display at London’s Natural History Museum.”
The one on display in Laramie was found in 1994
https://web.archive.org/web/20060827043650/http://www.uwyo.edu/geomuseum/tour/stegosaurus.asp
“The Stegosaurus hanging on the UW Geological Museum wall is a cast of a reconstructed juvenile Stegosaurus stenops. In 1994, the original of this skeleton was found a short distance from the historic American Museum of Natural History Bone Cabin Quarry northeast of Medicine Bow, Wyoming.”
The University of Wyoming Geological Museum
https://www.uwyo.edu/geomuseum/
does not have a photo gallery per se. There’s a facebook page but you only get a short look at it before you get nagged to log in (don’t have a facebook account, so…)
However, you can see it here
along with a readable picture of the info plaque.
So it does not appear to be a composite. Now I’m curious about the pieces parts. Was the wall cast made by laying the bones on the ground? Are the remains what is on display at the NHM in London?
Scott Hartman
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Mark Loewen
