There's a ton of edgy ass depictions in paleoart of derived ceratopsians "supplementing" their diet with meat or small animals while having retarded quills running all the way down their back that there's no proof of existing in derived ceratopsians, but somehow none of them think to depict centrosaurines or hadrosaurs from Dinosaur Park Formation eating rotten wood with fungal fruiting bodies coming out of it? Even though there's an abundance of coprolites filled with degraded conifer wood and a reptile the size of a rhino that would probably try eating your drywall is more kino than whatever reddittards come up with? Are there any modern animals that do something similar to this?
Maybe they weren't specifically eating the wood but instead desired the delectable fungus that decomposed it.
>>5139026I think so too. Also during the Late Cretaceous big herbivorous dinosaurs in this part of the world existed at high paleolatitudes with deciduous vegetation (Frenchman Formation, Prince Creek), so maybe the ones which didn't migrate just chowed down on logs like deer will eat bark and twigs in the winter. It's impressive that while getting the nutritional value out of a rotting log they ate so much wood that their turds came out full of splinters though. Is there legit any animal that can does this that we know of?
elephants
>>5139029>Is there legit any animal that can does this that we know of?Gorillas do this
>>5139057oh, is that why they need their absurd bite force?
>>5139081They would have evolved a strong bite for processing tough foliage and then that opened the door to being able to chew rotting wood. Frugivorous apes don’t seem to do it. Most other herbivores can’t either but ceratopsians were like elephant sized snapping turtles
>>5139023I seriously doubt the explanation for this is that they were eating rotten logs. Paleontologists are basically legendary for finding something interesting and drawing the completely wrong conclusions. Elephants eat entire trees all the time. Why would we think that lizards the size of elephants wouldn't? This is pretty basic.
>>5139145>can't read good>fails to understand written material>thinks other people are dumbchecks out
>>5139155I read it fine. Although it did take me into a little trip to investigate Dinosaur Park's flora. As I expected, it's quite similar to Hell Creek and dominated by angiosperms. Which makes it interesting that the only two confirmed plants consumed by Hadrosaurs are both conifers. If I had to guess I would say that they were probably the same species even - Araucaria longifolia, especially given the fact that both Hadrosaurs were Saurolophines, possibly on the same chronolineage (I haven't investigated this yet). The presence of fungi in the coprolites could easily just be explained by post-digestion colonization. Notice they also mention small diameter twig fragments. These animals were clearly just eating branches of trees. It's a very simple explanation. They just want it to be more unusual because they get more attention for it. I really wish that paleontologist would take paleontology more seriously. It's an interesting field. But all anybody wants to do is act like a fucking clown these days. >>5139023I'm glad you called my attention to this though. It helps reinforce knowledge of dinosaur diets. I downloaded the paper but I can't make out anything identifiable from the wood so it's difficult to tell even what family oblongs to. The author claims it's Cupressaceous but that's based on personal communication so it's not really much to go on. Given the location and sedimentation these appear to be lowland or even directly coastal lowland forests. And at least some of the substrate is calcareous which they claim is coming from highlands but is much more likely to actually be coming from the ocean. That reinforces Araucaria, definitely not Sequoia.
>>5139165Lol already had the paper years ago and forgot to read it.
>>5139165>I read it fine.no you didn't or you would have understood why they said the wood was decomposed, not a live tree.In fact you still didn't understand it.you are very bad at reading english.
>>5139165I get the impression from reading that a lot of the Dinosaur Park formation looked sort of like a grassless version of Southern Florida's pine flatwoods. Is this accurate or innacurate?
>>5139206Nah from the pollen species recorded It sounds very similar to Hell Creek which would have been similar to a forest in subtropical China. Open habitats like you're talking about weren't really much of a thing in the late Cretaceous. That's more of a Jurassic thing.
>>5139216How did such big, long, animals, many of which had reasonably stiff tails, navigate such an environment assuming those aren't gallery forests? I always heard the meme pushed that because of this and because of large browsing herbivores mesozoic forests are almost always more open than cenozoic ones, is that bullshit? Also do you have any good papers on the actual paleoclimate of Hell Creek? The wiki page has a source that claims a not-even subtropical climate with cool winters>A leaf analysis of the Hell Creek I floral zone produced a mean annual temperature of 11.3–11.6 °C (52.3–52.9 °F), a warm month mean temperature of 20.1–20.5 °C (68.2–68.9 °F), and a cold month mean temperature of 2.6 °C (36.7 °F) with a mean annual precipitation of 191–197 centimetres (75–78 in), placing the lower Hell Creek Formation in the Cfb climate zone.[18]That rainfall is insane too. It would basically make Hell Creek a temperate rainforest as exists in Chile, New Zealand or the Pacific Northwest of the USA no? I assume Hell Creek I is not the part right in the few hundred thousand years before the end of the Maastrichtian where things starts to get warmer and swampier again, no?Also, I have a question about Albertosaurines - do you think it's legit that Albertosaurines and Tyrannosaurines/Daspletosaurus practiced niche partitioning between preying on Hadrosaurs and Ceratopsians respectively? If so, is it likely that Albertosaurines went extinct part because of the extirpation of Lambeosaurines at the end of the Campanian and that this all had some relation to the Laramide Orogeny impacting their habitats? And would this then be sort of analogous to the extinction of the Sparassodonts being caused maybe in part by the uplift of the Andes in the Cenozoic?
>>5139221The gaps between trees in old growth forests are usually quite a bit wider than people think. What a lot of people think of as "forest" with a bunch of young trees all tightly clustered together and bushes and vines is just a thicket. Keep in mind also Hell Creek has a lot of different ecosystems. There's everything from coastal Araucaria forests similar to New Caledonia except with less mountains on the coast probably two upland forest dominated by what appears to be Sequoia but there's been disputes about what the genus actually is. Most of Hell Creek is covered by Katsura forest which would have been a kind of subtropical hilly forest similar to one with Katsura trees like in Japan or China. Along Rivers there were also palms and lots of the kind of vegetation you would expect to see in the modern day minus grasses. And there were a lot of swamps at Hell Creek and these are largely where the Triceratops and Edmontosaurus lived.
>>5139221As for climate I wouldn't believe a damn thing paleontologists have to say on this issue. This is another one of those topics where paleontologists insist on getting the facts wrong to try to shoehorn the Mesozoic into a Cenozoic paradigm. We can tell just from the plants alone at Hell Creek that it was subtropical and there was certainly almost never any kind of snow or frost. Not only that though the whole planet was devoid of ice caps at that time so there would have been no refuge for ice except maybe in the high mountains at that point. So that had a moderating effect across the entire planet even in habitats that today might get frost. The typical numbers given for the average temperature and rainfall are absolutely fucking ludicrous because they match that of Northern Ohio. And Hell Creek was absolutely nothing like Northern Ohio. It was much warmer, had much milder winters and it certainly had more rainfall. Multiple organisms from the area give a clearly subtropical to tropical indication. There are lizards like Varanids and Teiids that are only found in the tropics and palms are not uncommon though they're not terribly diverse in the area. The rainfall figure you gave was actually higher than they usually indicate. And those temperatures are fucking laughable. They directly contradict the kind of species found at Hell Creek. Because they keep trying to shoehorn the climate into a Cenozoic paradigm the only thing they can compare it to is like Seattle, which it was very much not like. As for the Tyrannosaurs a lot of the diversity that people see in the fossil record are actually just chronolineages. So they wouldn't have occurred at the same time. Now I don't know specifically about the chronolineage that leads to Tyrannosaurus because I haven't really studied them yet. But when it comes to other groups you can see the chronolineages happen. So that old chestnut about Laramidia having too many animals is nonsense.
>>5139023>Are there any modern animals that do something similar to this?Elephants eat tree bark and branches.https://youtu.be/s2AGNUtnJiI?si=czSjejCLvg4EAY63
>>5139023> Are there any modern animals that do something similar to this?no
