Ecology

It can be quite a challenge to understand the ecology of a species that is now extinct, without any living relatives. The bones offer many clues about behaviour and functionality, but to really understand the nature of a creature's interactions with its neighbouring species, the ecosystem as a whole must be resurrected and all its members accounted for. In some cases, this is nearly impossible. Miles of sandstone with only a few fossil specimens does not tell a lot about the diversity of an ancient habitat. However, some geological formations are remarkably complete, with plants and animals represented by a variety of forms.

I have a specific approach to paleoecology that I have used for several years now. By cataloguing exactly which species are present in a formation, the top-predators, common herbivores, rarities, ground cover, tree species, and many other ecological groups can be distinguished through comparison to their neighbours. For example, the Hell Creek formation is dominated by hadrosaurs and ceratopsians, both large, herding herbivores. Tyrannosaurus is the dominant predator of these several tonne giants and smaller creatures, for which there is a great abundance and diversity, are hunted by a couple different species of dromaeosaurs. It takes patience, but there are great resources that make such large-scale studies possible. In the future, I hope to have most of the fossil-bearing formations analyzed. It would be like a modern-day time machine. We could simply choose a formation and get a list of the inhabitants that live there. There are so many applications to this method: the comparison of different ecosystems (formations), the mapping of these ecosystems on a hypothetical pre-Flood map, identifying successive stages of the global flood and its influence on individual ecosystems. I'm excited to see where paleoecology will lead me.