RE: Ancient mountains

["W. F. Zimmerman, wfzimmerman.com" <wfz@wfzimmerman.com>]

There are fairly distinctive anatomical characteristics of today's
mountain-adapted grazers -- the hooves, etc., the legs (not sure what the
words are, but they're typically bowed inward toward the center of the
animal, eh?) -- do pachys exhibit any of those?  I don't seem to recall them
in the reconstructions I've seen...

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-dinosaur@usc.edu [mailto:owner-dinosaur@usc.edu] On Behalf Of
frank bliss
Sent: Wednesday, August 24, 2005 10:49 AM
To: dinosaur@usc.edu
Subject: Re: Ancient mountains

Over the last several years, numerous pachycephalosaurus fossil pieces 
and parts have come out of Hell Creek Formation on my ranch which was 
definitely not mountainous terrain during the Cretaceous.  (It was a 
sandy broad fairly flat coastal plain laced with numerous rivers.) The 
mountains were quite distant to the west at the time as nothing larger 
than sand made it down river over the distance. The relatively fresh 
(unrounded) condition of these fossils seem to indicate a fairly local 
origin meaning the original owners lived nearby.  This is not to say 
that pachys  did not live in mountainous terrain, but would seem to 
preclude exclusivity to such.  I suspect that elevational climatic 
differences were minimized during the last days of the Cretaceous.  
Given the large time intervals involved, any zone with an appropriate 
environment would have been inhabited by this fairly widespread group.
Frank Bliss
MS Biostratigraphy
Weston, Wyoming
www.cattleranch.org

On Aug 24, 2005, at 8:31 AM, W. F. Zimmerman, wfzimmerman.com wrote:

> "Solid" evidence? As in solid heads? ;-)
>
> I think the theory is that all animals that butt heads for a living 
> must
> reside in mountains.  The "bonk" carries better with an echo, you see 
> ...
>
> Rams, goats, pachycephalasaurs ...
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-dinosaur@usc.edu [mailto:owner-dinosaur@usc.edu] On Behalf 
> Of
> FlxLandry@aol.com
> Sent: Wednesday, August 24, 2005 10:25 AM
> To: dinosaur@usc.edu
> Subject: Re: Ancient mountains
>
> Thank you very much! I didn't know that so much  work had been done on 
> the
> subject. Most paleo books I have seen don't go very  far into ancient
> geography,
> which I think is quite a pity. Czerkas's Dinosaurs:A  Global View was 
> quite
> good at describing ancient environments however, if I  recall 
> correctly (I
> don't have any of my paleo stuff at hand right now). Is it  still 
> considered
> to be
> reasonably accurate on that topic? And, by the way,  weren't
> pachycephalosaurs thought to have lived in mountains? Was there any  
> solid
> evidence for this
> hypothesis?
>
> Best regards,
>
> Félix Landry
>
>
>