Dinosaur habitats

[Mamasaurus]

I was wondering what kind of habitat various species are supposed to have occupied. For example, Great Plains (or Jurassic equivalent), may be a more appropriate habitat for diplodocus than a dense forest.  The earth has very diverse ecosystems today, and I'm sure they were no less varied during the Mesezoic.  I thought it would be cool to have a thread speculating on what sort of ecological niches various critters could have been in. It makes for interesting scenarios for paleo art and dioramas. 😊

I am particularly interested in Jurassic critters at the moment because of a project I'm working on, but I'd love to speculate on any critter or time period really. 😊

[Halichoeres]

Almost the whole world was warm, and the continents were all closer to the equator, so there was a lot of forest. But flowering plants hadn't evolved yet, so there were rainforests of conifers. Take the maples out of Seattle and crank up the heat and maybe you have the idea. At the same time, there was less total land area than now, so I guess my point is that terrestrial habitats really were less varied (things changed in the Cretaceous, with the advent of angiosperms). There couldn't have been plains because grasses and even sedges hadn't evolved yet, but there might have been large expanses of low-growing cycads, or horsetails, or ferns. That's the sort of thing a Diplodocus would probably have eaten.

[DinoLord]

Many of the best known fossil formations (Morrison, Hell Creek, etc.) were primarily floodplains, as such an environment is particularly conducive to the fossilization process.

I know the Morrison and Tendaguru were both floodplain environments with a dry and wet season. In John Foster's Jurassic West, he describes the various habitats present in the Morrison - in addition to wetland-type areas there were fern plains and densely wooded areas. The Tendaguru also had wooded areas and various forms of conifers present, but had some brackish areas as well (there are various pdfs detailing the Tendaguru flora available online).

If you have access to Greg Paul's The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs, he includes information on likely habitat for many of the species listed.

[HD-man]

I was wondering what kind of habitat various species are supposed to have occupied. For example, Great Plains (or Jurassic equivalent), may be a more appropriate habitat for diplodocus than a dense forest.  The earth has very diverse ecosystems today, and I'm sure they were no less varied during the Mesezoic.  I thought it would be cool to have a thread speculating on what sort of ecological niches various critters could have been in. It makes for interesting scenarios for paleo art and dioramas. 😊

I am particularly interested in Jurassic critters at the moment because of a project I'm working on, but I'd love to speculate on any critter or time period really. 😊

See the following quote. Hope this helps.

Quoting Gardom/Milner ( http://www.amazon.com/Natural-History-Museum-Book-Dinosaurs/dp/184442183X ):

In the Jurassic Period...the single land mass of Pangaea was split in two by huge rifts in the Earth's surface that created two new land areas, Laurasia in the north and Gondwana in the south. Despite this dramatic separation, fossil skeletons of Brachiosaurus and plated stegosaurs are now found as far apart as Africa and North America, showing that there must have been at least occasional land bridges between the new supercontinents.
The break up of the land mass and the creation of large seas between the supercontinents affected the global climate. The temperatures fell slightly and increasing rainfall and a mild climate allowed lush tropical vegetation to grow over huge areas. Ferns and horsetails provided ground cover, while ginkgoes and tree ferns were found near many rivers and lakes. Some of this vegetation became coal seams which we still mine today. Forests of cycads, conifers and sequoias covered thousands of square miles of the drier areas.
The lush conditions gave rise to quite new and extraordinary kinds of dinosaur, among them the sauropods like Apatosaurus, Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus, the largest animals ever to walk on Earth. Anything that needs to consume a tonne of greenery a day has to be sure of a huge supply within easy walking distance...The sauropods' long necks gave them access to the higher, tree-top vegetation that other dinosaurs could not reach, and by the end of the Jurassic their herds dominated the landscape. Other new types of dinosaurs evolved alongside the sauropods, including the large meat-eaters like Allosaurus and plated plant-eaters like Stegosaurus. Smaller coelurosaurs like Coelurus and Ornitholestes hunted lizards, mammals, frogs and insects among the ferns, horsetails and mosses.
Apart from flying insects, including early ancestors of bees and flies, the air was dominated by the pterosaurs...the flying reptiles from the same original archosaur group as the dinosaurs. Archaeopteryx also appeared in the Jurassic Period. This is the earliest known bird and retains many distinctive dinosaur features, proving that birds actually evolved from small meat-eating dinosaurs.
In terms of sheer size and geographical spread, the Jurassic Period is the high point of the dinosaur era. The fully improved stance, so effective in giving the early dinosaurs an evolutionary lead over the other archosaurs, also allowed them to develop varied body shapes and sizes to exploit different parts of the ecosystem. By the end of the Jurassic, dinosaurs had expanded to fill virtually every usable part of the land surface. Increasing numbers of the largest sauropods roamed in herds and trampled large areas of vegetation.