Pioneering prehistoric landscape reconstruction reveals early dinosaurs lived on tropical islands

The Bristol dinosaur, Thecodontosaurus, standing on one of the palaeo-island's beaches Artwork by Fabio Pastori, pixel-shack.com; © University of Bristol - A new study using leading edge technology has shed surprising light on the ancient habitat where some of the first dinosaurs roamed in the UK around 200 million years ago. The research, led by the University of Bristol, examined hundreds of pieces of old and new data including historic literature vividly describing the landscape as a "landscape of limestone islands like the Florida Everglades? swept by storms powerful enough to "scatter pebbles, roll fragments of marl, break bones and teeth.' The evidence was carefully compiled and digitised so it could be used to generate for the first time a 3D map showing the evolution of a Caribbean-style environment, which played host to small dinosaurs, lizard-like animals, and some of the first mammals. "No one has ever gathered all this data before. It was often thought that these small dinosaurs and lizard-like animals lived in a desert landscape, but this provides the first standardised evidence supporting the theory that they lived alongside each other on flooded tropical islands,' said Jack Lovegrove, lead author of the study published today in Journal of the Geological Society. The study amassed all the data about the geological succession as measured all round Bristol through the last 200 years, from quarries, road sections, cliffs, and boreholes, and generated a 3D topographic model of the area to show the landscape before the Rhaetian flood, and through the next 5 million years as sea levels rose.