Hell Creek Facts
The Hell Creek Formation is among the famous and intensely studied dinosaur fossil sites. Hell Creek is expansive and is known to include areas of Eastern Montana Badlands, Northwestern South Dakota, and Southwestern North Dakota. In simple words, Hell Creek Formation is a division of rocks in North America dating to the end of the Cretaceous Period some 65.5 million years ago. It is about 175 meters thick and consists of grayish sandstones with interbedded lignites. Therefore, it is an intensively studied division of mostly Upper Cretaceous and some lower Paleocene rocks in North America and is why various online portals are offering out Hell Creek fossils for sale.
Its Depositional Environment:
It is considered a series of fresh and brackish water clays, mudstones, and sandstones that are deposited by fluvial activity in fluctuating channels and deltas. The Hell Creek Formation has been consequently interpreted as a flat, forested floodplain with a relatively subtropic climate that is entirely able to support a variety of plant species.
The Hell Creek Formation biota is most famous for its dinosaurs, majorly for most Hadrosaurid dinosaurs ever found, but is otherwise vast and diverse, covering all aspects of species of plants, invertebrates, fish, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals. Avian Dinosaurs (Birds) and pterosaur fossils have also been found.
Following Dinosaurs have been discovered from Hell Creek.
– Tyrannosaurus rex
– Troodon formosus
– Nodosaurids
– Nanotyrannus lancensis
– Anatotitan Copel
– Thescelosaurus
– Triceratops horridus
– Torosaurus latus, and much more.
One of the species that has been abundantly found within the stratigraphic framework of Hell Creek is the horned dinosaur Triceratops. The placement of 50 skulls of this species tends to reveal the evolutionary transformation of this genus. Such findings and interpretations of variable dinosaur diversity illuminate potential modes of evolution in the Dinosauria.
Hell Creek is the best-studied among many ancient environments. At that time, the region was warm, subtropical, and had a warm climate. The climate was researched to be humid, with flowering plants, conifers, canopy, and understory plants. Considering this relatively huge flora, an abundance of fossil leaves have been found at dozens of different sites, further indicating that the area was largely forested by small trees. We can thus, come to an observatory conclusion that the dinosaur collection made over the past decade during some Hell Creek Projects yielded new information regarding robust data.
Farby now, Triceratops has been the most common dinosaur at around 40%. Tyrannosaurus holds the second place at 24%. Edmontosaurus is at number third at 20%, followed by Thescelosaurus at 8%. The rest of them are said to be very rare and hold positions at 1%. The world’s most extensive collection of Hell Creek fossils is housed and exhibited at the Museum of the Rockies, Montana.
Author’s Bio – The author is a blogger and this article deals in the information about The Hell Creek and Hell Creek Fossils.
