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Re: Fastovsky vs Archibald



----- Original Message -----
From: "Tim Donovan" <uwrk2@yahoo.com>
Sent: Friday, June 24, 2005 12:48 PM

It is true that the presence of Triceratops and
Edmontosaurus suggests a paleoenvironment which
excluded lambeosaurs. But the Scollard seems to be the
kind of relatively dry inland environment which
favored Hypacrosaurus and Saurolophus in the late
Horseshoe Canyon period. Based on environmental and
faunal differences, Lehman considered the Scollard
part of a Leptoceratops biozone distinct from the
Triceratops zone of MT etc. I suspect that by Scollard
times Edmontosaurus and other taxa moved into more
upland habitats left vacant by the waning of
lambeosaurs and others.

Hm.

What, actually, tells us that (for the purposes of biogeography) there were only two kinds of environment (wet coastal plain, dry inland/upland areas)? What if a north-south temperature gradient -- Alberta seems to have been noticeably cooler than Wyoming in Hell Creek times -- played a role? (For mammals it seems to have been pretty important.) What if... it's certainly difficult to test, but perhaps some herbivorous dinosaurs preferred some kinds of plant that required, for example, certain types of soil? This way it is, for example, imaginable that certain species lived on the coastal plain but _between_ the rivers. In short, I can't tell anything specific about your inferences cited above, but it could well be that you are using so much induction that they cease to be scientific.