Cretaceous Mongolia

Cretaceous Mongolia is one of the strangest and best preserved of all Mesozoic ecosystems. The shifting sand of what was even then the Gobi Desert have ensured that fossils of the animals that lived there can be found in exacly the position that they were buried in with most of the bones together. The most famous of these fossils is that of the perfecly preserved remains of a velociraptor locked in combat with a protoceratops, a small ceratopsian.

Dinosaurs in cretaceous Mongolia

Mongolia is odd because the comparative lack of food means that most of the dinosaurs there remained quite small, most no bigger than a man. There were a few large dinosaurs though. Tarbosaurus was the Mongolian equivalent of tyrannosaurus rex and was almost as large. The large herbivores grew into many strange shapes. Therezinosaurus was a bipedal herbivore about as tall as tarbosaurus with a long neck, small head and characteristic long claws on the hands which it used for defence and to help it browse far away trees. Small ankylosaurs were the armour-plated residents and hadrosaurs provided large prey for the carnivores. Strange creatures like the oviraptor fed on many of the same things velociraptor did and the two species often competed for food. The Gobi Desert was often interspersed with scrubland and occasionally a dense rainforest supporting many types of plant life, insects and small dinosaurs like mononeichus. Dinosaurs like these and the velociraptor were among the dinosaurs that would eventually evolve into modern birds.