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Scientists have revealed what may be the world ’s largest dinosaur cemetery .
The dinosaurs may have been part of a mass dice - off result from a behemoth storm , comparable to today ’s hurricanes , which struck what was then a coastal area .
A herd of centrosaurs (a type of horned dinosaur) drowning in a flood millions of years ago in what is now Alberta, as depicted in this illustration. They left behind what could be the world’s largest dinosaur graveyard.
The findings could help lick a whodunit concerning why the Bad Lands of western Canada are so rich in dinosaur dodo .
The roughly 76 - million - year - former fogy beds apparently hold thousands of bones over an area of at least 568 Acre ( 2.3 square km ) , skeletons that belong to a approximately cow - sized , plant - eat horned dinosaur known asCentrosaurus . This treasure treasure trove provides the first strong evidence that somehorned dinosaur herdswere much orotund than previously thought , with numbers easily in the high hundreds to low 1000 , said aged inquiry scientist David Eberth , a paleontologist and geologist at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta .
The " mega - bonebed , " which dwell of 14 smaller bonebeds , lies in northerly Alberta near Hilda , Canada , right by the mete with Saskatchewan . The graveyard was really discovered in 1997 , but confirmation of the discovery ’s size was detail this calendar month in the book " New Perspectives On Horned dinosaur " ( Indiana University Press , 2010 ) . [ instance of centrosaur herd ]
Alberta is inordinately plenteous in fogey , such as those of duck’s egg - placard dinosaur , horned dinosaurs includingTriceratops , ankylosaurus , raptors relate toVelociraptor , and tyrannosaurids such asAlbertosaurusandTyrannosaurus male monarch . The expanse was home to a remarkable diversity of other beast as well , including birds , pterosaur , alligators , turtleneck , lizard and mammals — in fact , scientists of late find oneself mammal tooth marks on dinosaur bones in Alberta .
thou croak in flood
Back when these centrosaurs exist , Alberta was warm and lush , and encompassed lowlands on the western seashore of the Western Interior Seaway , a Brobdingnagian inland ocean that divided what is now North America in half . The direction the fossil are tie together in the same layers of earth within these bonebeds paint a picture all these centrosaurs were wiped out simultaneously .
The likely perpetrator in this scenario was acatastrophic storm , which could rapidly have routinely made the waters flood up as high as 12 to 15 feet ( 3.6 to 4.6 meters ) , if experiences with modern floodplains are any usher .
" The flooding could have reached more than 100 kilometers ( 60 nautical mile ) from the shoreline , " Eberth told LiveScience . " The landscape essentially just drown . "
The savorless area would have cater no high ground for escape , leading to one thousand of animals drowning in the rising waters .
" It ’s unlikely that these animate being could step water for very long , so the scale of the massacre must have been breathless , " Eberth say . " The evidence suggests that after the flood , dinosaur scavengersreentered the expanse , trampling and smashing castanets in their attempt to feast on the rotting clay . "
fogey mystery solved
These storms could also help explain why fossils are so abundant in the Bad Lands of western Canada overall , " and why they are often receive preserved so exquisitely , " Eberth said .
Coastal floodplains such as those seen in advanced Bangladesh can embrace immense areas , with flooding killing hundreds of thousands of livestock , not to mention the human tragedies that hap .
" Because of their size of it and the weighing machine of the implosion therapy , dinosaur could not get away the coastal floodwaters and would have been vote out in large numbers , " Eberth explain . " In contrast , fish , small reptiles , mammals , and snort may have been able to escape such seasonal catastrophe by retreat to quiet water supply domain , the rubber of trees and tunnel , or simply by flying forth . "
The researcher now hope to take object lesson they have learned in Alberta to liken it to other parts of the creation in an feat to pinpoint signs of preceding catastrophes elsewhere .
This article was update at 1:54 atomic number 61 ET .
