Dino's Life and Death Revealed at British Site

July 11, 2008 -- An Iguanodon feasting on ferns died, perhaps after becoming stuck in a marshy floodplain, and was then consumed by an enormous dinosaur with huge claws that left behind a few of its teeth, suggests a new study on animal and plant remains excavated in southern England.

The findings, which are described in a paper accepted for publication in the journal Cretaceous Research, even indicate what happened in the region well before the Iguanodon was born, as well as what took place after the hungry carnivore, Baryonyx, enjoyed its Iguanodon feast.

"Our study is in that regard remarkable, as it is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary study of the sedimentology and all the different microfossil groups present in the dinosaur-bearing bed," co-author Susanne Feist-Burkhardt told Discovery News.

She added, "Usually you will find a publication each about one fossil group and it is difficult to fit the information together into a single coherent picture."

That was not the case for this set of finds, dating to around 130,000,000 years ago and excavated at the Smokejacks Brickworks in Ockley, Surrey. The animal remains, along with pollen grains from some of the world's earliest flowering plants, spores, megaspores, green algae and shellfish, all paint a picture of certain events and what the environment there was like during the Early Cretaceous.

The pollen and spores indicate that many thousands of years before the Iguanodon was born, cone-bearing trees and big shrubs dominated the site. As time went on, liverworts and various types of ferns and mosses emerged. Dense fern undergrowth was then dotted here and there with the early flowers, all belonging to the genus Retimonocolpites.

When the Iguanodon came on the scene, this plant eater had its pick of edibles.

"Iguanodon was a large herbivorous animal and probably fed on all available vegetation, the conifers as well as the leafy and more nutritious pteridophytes (mosses and ferns)," explained Feist-Burkhardt, a researcher in palynology at the Natural History Museum in London. "The Iguanodon probably moved out onto the exposed floodplain for the only available freshwater during the dry season and fed on the available plants."