Page 36 - DINOSOUR ATLAS

hell creek

barnum brown hell creek Vegetation
Barnum Brown (1873–1963) began Sixty-five million years ago, Hell Creek
work at The American Museum was a woodland landscape. Trees from
of Natural History, New York City, the conifer, laurel, sycamore, beech,
in 1898. In 1901 he was shown magnolia, and palm families grew in
photographs of dinosaur bones in the moist, humid climate. Mosses
Montana. The following year he led grew on the ground, as did ferns.
the first expedition to the region, There was no grass, however.
and discovered the partial skeleton
of a new species of large meat-eating
dinosaur. In 1905, Brown’s dinosaur
was named Tyrannosaurus rex.
Broad-leaved Trees
grew for the first time
during this period

TeeTH marks have been
found in the bones of many
dinosaurs that inhabited
Hell Creek

edmontonia
A member of the ankylosaur
family, Edmontonia was an
armored herbivore whose helopanoplia
body was covered in bony
plates and spikes. Several different kinds
of turtle lived in the
rivers and streams that
crossed the floodplain.
They were a good
source of food for the
predators of the creek.

hell creek today
The soft rocks of Hell Creek have
been steadily eroded by the actions
of wind, water, and ice, wearing them tyrannosaurus
into the deep canyons and ravines This was the biggest carnivore
that characterize the area today. of the Late Cretaceous, and
Known as “badlands,” (because the the top predator in the Hell
terrain is bad land to cross over) the Creek environment.
dinosaur-bearing rocks lie in thick,
horizontal layers. The oldest are at the
bottom, and the youngest at the top.

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