*****SPAM***** Late Cretaceous Giant Ceratopsians and Hadrosaurs

["Vlad Petnicki" <bucketfoot-al@justice.com>]

Vlad, if you think about it - it makes sense from an
ecosystem point of view.

We know that the really large dinosaurs - the sauropods
- had disappeared from Western North America by the
mid-Cretaceous, as the conditions changed and animals
got smaller.  They did not reappear until just at the
end, when Alamosaurus apparently migrated over a new
land bridge to South America, and made it as far as
Texas before the mass extinction.

As the Cretaceous drew to a close, climactic conditions
in Western N. America changed to once again favor large
size - hence the ascent of the T-Rex, Triceratops,
Torosaurus, Anatotitan, etc.

Now, since the "giant" niche was lacking the suropods,
does it not make sense that some other species
(Hadrosaurids or Ceratopsians) would have "stepped up
to the plate" (an American baseball expression) to fill
it?

Just some food for thought.  Other than the footprints,
I am not exactly sure what the fossil record shows of
the supposedly giant Hadrosaurids;  however, the giant
Triceratops neck found by Barnum Brown, as well as the
Trice. skull at BYU tell us that this species could get
much larger than previously thought.

P.S. Anybody out there have a photo or a link
discussing the oversized BYU Triceratops skull?

Cheers, Vlad

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