The Boreal house displaying a boreal forest and plain.

Alaskan Yellow Cedar: This tree is perfectly suitable for the Late Pleistocene animals of the mammoth steppe. That said, as the mammoth steppe was dominated primarily grasses and low flowering herbs such as seasonal flowers and low-growing perennial plants, I'd recommend trees be used sparingly.

An appropriate proxy for certain tropical-to-temperate weeping species of Dacrydium, a genus in the family Podocarpaceae – a family of fruiting conifers that dates back to the Triassic. It could also proxy for certain species of tropical weeping cypresses, which evolved during the Middle to Late Jurassic. The tree should be widened out when representing a weeping podocarp or cypress from an area that does not experience large amounts of snowfall.


A weeping podocarp grows on a riverside, in an exhibit based around the Huincul Formation.

Boreal Scots Pine: Scots pines grow from the Mediterranean to Sweden and Norway. This growth form in particular is suitable for wooded areas in the cold northerly reaches of its habitat from the Pleistocene to the modern day, as well as for exposed sites and high alpine areas further in the past. The pine genus most likely evolved in Eurasia in the Early Cretaceous.


Mammoths move through open woodland.

Dwarf Birch: The Dwarf Birch grows in the open and will grow in dry conditions. It's found in Northern Europe, Siberia and in the Northern United states, in northerly regions, but as far south as the Balkans and Swiss Alps at higher altitudes as refuge populations. This indicates the plant was very likely widespread during the Pleistocene, and would have likely been a common part of the cold dry mammoth steppe. If you want to use it for a proxy, it can fill the role of a deciduous temperate or dry-land dwelling woody shrub from the start of the Cretaceous onward.

Fireweed: A plant that thrives in disturbed areas, particularly fire disturbed areas, in the northern hemisphere. Fireweed grows in boreal and temperate areas, it would not be out of place springing back after a wild fire on the mammoth steppe as it would at la Brea. The model is suitable to proxy as many different types of herbaceous flowering plants, so they should not look too out of place in the Early Cretaceous.


An Elasmotherium grazes on fireweed on the mammoth steppe.

Labrador Tea: A bog plant from Northern North America. It may have been more widespread when the Bering land bridge existed. It's suitable in boggy sites or along slow-flowing rivers in North American tundra environments such as the mammoth steppe. It is additionally a suitable proxy for more temperate or even tropical herbaceous plants, and would not look out of place in the Early Cretaceous.

Tundra Grass: A tussock-forming grass suitable for cold areas around the globe. During the previous glacial maximums there were permanent glaciers on all continents aside from Africa, although I don't doubt that cold wind swept conditions would have prevailed in South Africa, making this grass extremely suitable for this time in earth's history. What's more, the grass can be used as any tussock forming grass growing in a dry or seasonally cold area from the Oligocene onwards.

Alpine Bearberry: A prostrate shrub with red leaves. Found all around the subarctic regions of Eurasia and North America, so it's suitable for late Pleistocene animals of the mammoth steppe. The models in Prehistoric Kingdom are frankly too tall, so best squish them down and sink them into the ground.

Alpine Currant: Suitable for late Pleistocene animals of the mammoth steppe. The flatter forms are the most suitable for the steppe itself, the taller bush is more suitable around the trees, perhaps in thickets, or down by a source of water. Also suitable for cold temperate forests similar to those of Vancouver Island, BC Canada – An environment roughly analogous to the Prince Creek Formation (although inland areas further north may have been more exposed and colder).


A pair of tyrannosaurs travels deep through a cold temperate forest, in the Prince's Creek Cold House.

Douglas Fir: This tree is perfectly suitable for the late Pleistocene animals of the mammoth steppe. That said, as the mammoth steppe was dominated by grasses and low herbaceous plants (basically herbs and flowers) I'd recommend trees be used sparingly.

An appropriate proxy for many a large conifer, especially other members of the pine family like firs, spruces or Keteleeria. That gives them great temporal range. For example, know that the earliest known spruce was from the Early Cretaceous of Canada.
Upsize the trees to dominate the forest and they will be suitable for all well watered forests from the Jurassic to the modern day. As useful for the gallery forests of the Jurassic as it is as the emergent trees of the conifer-dominated jungle of the Kaiparowits Formation or the cold temperate conifer forest of the Prince Creek Formation. The tree should, in contexts without high snow fall, be widened out to give it a much broader canopy.


The Douglas fir is used to fill the role of large conifers dominating the tropical jungle of this Campanian exhibit.

The Mesozoic was an overall warm era in our earth's history. That doesn't mean there were never colder intervals or that snow didn't fall anywhere (see the later section in this guide titled 'Cold Mesozoic Environments'), but places very close to the poles nonetheless retained temperate climates. For that reason, I wouldn't describe these plants as fitting boreal in the climate sense, but I understand that they had to give the biome something (and I'm glad they did!).

 

Aculea

This fern of unknown affinity grew in thickets in the polar forests of Australia, Antarctica, and South America during the Early Cretaceous. It sprouted fronds from creeping rhizomes. I love its bronze pigmentation!

When scaled, squashed and sunken down, it could pass as some species of spikemoss, aka Selaginella. That would allow it to be used in shady spots in humid formations just about anywhere.

Sources:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195667196900130
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031018217306697
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195667107000638

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Athrotaxites

In the highlands of Tasmania lives a small-to medium sized tree called Athrotaxis. It is the last survivor of a once more widespread subfamily of cypresses, and it represents one of the earliest branching members of the Cupressaceae. I wouldn’t describe it as a boreal plant, more like upland temperate rainforest. Sounds pretty Mesozoic polar if you put it like that...
Fossils that are clearly of the subfamily Athrotaxioideae, but which can’t decisively be put into the living genus, are most often classified as Athrotaxites. They’re thought to be the closest relatives and direct ancestors of the modern genus. Taking both genera together (because they’re so similar, and modern Athrotaxis is what this model is based off of), they’re known from the Late Jurassic through to the modern day. In the northern hemisphere, they’re known from places like Germany (Solnhofen!), China and the USA, and they stick around here even into the Paleogene. In the southern hemisphere, they actually appear a little later, in locations like Argentina, Antarctica and, of course, Australia. So a very widespread taxon, but never all that locally abundant in the fossil record (which may be to do with its habitat).

In summary, I think these are useful for just about every vaguely temperate formation in the Cretaceous and later, and especially for the Early Cretaceous. When proxying for a different small-leaved cypress or even a member of the extinct Hirmeriellaceae, this is doubly true, and you can use it in places that are a lot more arid as well. And the dead models (I love that we got those!) can of course pass as just about anything.

A foggy day in the uplands near the Dinosaur Park Formation.

The name coastal for this biome can be a bit misleading. Though the plants featured here don't necessarily live near the coast, they are dependent on relatively humid conditions throughout the year, and mild winters. That means they're not very suited for continental climates and will often indeed not be found too far from the sea. They can also appear in 'gallery forests' near the banks of rivers, or on the rain-receiving sides of mountains. Another name for this biome could've been Subtropical/Warm Temperate (Montane) Rainforest.

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Coast Redwood: Redwoods/sequoias and their relatives date back to approximately the middle of the Jurassic. Though now only found in California and China, they were once dominant throughout the northern hemisphere in the Late Cretaceous and the Cenozoic. Fossils of the group have even been found as far south as Australia during the middle of the Cretaceous. There does seem to be some uncertainty about the internal relations of the clade and the origin of the genus Sequoia specifically, which is uniquely polyploid (has more than two of each chromosome). The leaf shape of this genus seems to have been fairly rare in any case, with some earlier instances of the fossils being reclassified into Metasequoia instead, the dawn redwood genus. That said, difference of habitat will result in difference of morphology, so even in the Cretaceous these trees could be appropriate for rain soaked mountains or gallery forests (the thick forests that line the banks of rivers). As one example, they can be used as Drumhellera of the Horseshoe Canyon Formation.
Coast redwoods grow to be the tallest trees in the world when conditions are foggy and damp enough, so definitely upsize these trees to twice or even three times the default size to make true giants of the forest.

Giant Sequoia: Another redwood genus, Sequoiadendron, only appears in the fossil record by the Late Cretaceous. It was found in both Russia and North America, so a Laurasian distribution at that time isn't too implausible. While they are comparatively more adapted for drier conditions to those of the Coastal redwood, they seem to still thrive in a subtropical and wet climate.

Scots Pine: This growth form of the widespread and diverse species is very suitable for drier or fire effected open forest, and more exposed positions in conifer forests. Pines are quite fire resistant, and fossils and charcoal indicate that they lived in very similar environments during the Mesozoic. These are suitable for thickets on the open plains of the Morrison Formation (proxying an earlier conifer of its family), all through to the Hell Creek Formation, to the present. Scots pine itself grows from the coastal dry conditions of the Mediterranean to the boreal forests of Sweden and Norway. It grows straight in forest settings but can get very curvy and broad-crowned in more open settings.

Rhododendron: This prolific genus of flowering plants in the heather family arose in the early Paleogene. Their hotspot of diversity is around the Himalayas, though there's species in places like North America and Australia too. That leaves precious few animals in the game for which the plant is suited, like Paraceratherium bugtiense when in a pen representing the highland habitat it may have visited, or Juxia sharamurenense. However, if you squint, the flowerless shrubs can pass for many a basal angiosperm, like the laurels and magnolias which were so common during the later Cretaceous.

Tree Fern: Absolutely everywhere in the Mesozoic. Tree ferns are fire hardy and will recover quickly after burning. Whilst modern tree ferns can't handle drought conditions, there are some seemingly drought hardy species from the Mesozoic, so seasonally dry plains are a possible habitat. As of Update 12, there are two morphs of tree fern in the game in order to better represent the diversity of these plants: a thicker, shorter type and a lanky tall one.

Sword Fern: Very suitable plant for sheltered and moist areas. Tropical relatives are surprisingly hardy in humid or shaded conditions. Grows well in swamps, forest edges, within the forest, or even in very exposed locations. In rainforests, these plants will grow on the trunks and branches of other trees and over rocks. They will grow up in the trunks of tree ferns and nestle in the old fronds of cycads and palms, so if you're depicting some humid conditions don't be afraid to apply the sword ferns liberally.

Bracken: An extremely hardy fern, suitable for all Mesozoic habitats. Capable of dying off to the underground roots during hard times, this plant grows all around the world and can in fact be quite a nuisance. We have fern leaves with similar features coming from the Jurassic, such as in association with the dry flood plains of the Morrison Formation. The leaf forms are called Cladophlebis and are probably associated with multiple fern families throughout time, not always closely related to actual bracken. These plants thrive in fire effected communities in the modern day, and pair well with the scots pine to represent a fire effected open forest/savanna environment. Throw in fan palms and you have modern Florida or the Hell Creek/Lance Formation; throw in some cycad proxies such as date palms and the tropical palm seedling, and you have the dry and seasonal plains of the Morrison.

Coastal Manroot : While manroot is native to Western North America in the modern day, its evolution is unclear. It is a member of the family Cucurbitaceae, the cucumbers, squashes and luffas, which seem to have been present by the Early Paleocene, although it is possible that they evolved earlier. It is unclear if manroot was a more commonly distributed genus earlier in the Cenozoic.

False Lily of the Valley: Native to the conifer forests of Western North America, Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, Korea, Japan and Kamchatka Peninsula. Other species within the genus Maianthemum are common in temperate and conifer forests in North America Asia and Europe.
When stretched a bit vertically, these actually aren't terrible proxies for Sanmiguelia of the Chinle Formation (Coelophysis), an enigmatic fossil that might just be our earliest known flowering plant.

Maidenhair Fern: A member of the genus Adiantum, which has a global distribution in wet habitats from tropical rainforest to temperate forest. Possibly, this is supposed to be A. aleuticum. Many other species look less like conventional ferns though, with fan-shaped leaflets.
Its fairly generic look makes it suitable throughout the Mesozoic and Cenozoic. In fact, a form genus of fern frond called Adiantitophyllum from Early Cretaceous Gondwana was named for its similarity.

Concept art for some extinct plants of the Coastal biome, shared by Tom Parker on his Bluesky[bsky.app].

All throughout the world, in strata from the Jurassic and Early Cretaceous, people find small fern fronds of a form called Coniopteris. They sprouted sporadically from horizontal rhizomes rather than growing in clusters. Some ferns are like this today as well. The plant seems to have been close to the Polypodiales, an order which is fairly recent as far as ferns go, but which contains most of their diversity in the modern day.
This fern grew in (seasonally) humid climates. It is very suitable for most dinosaurs in the game, although its range seems to have contracted a lot in the Late Cretaceous. It’s definitely not suitable for Gondwana in that epoch.

Source:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195667118303033?via%3Dihub#sec4

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(confirmed to be coming via Tom Parker's Bluesky page)
The evergreen conifer Elatides was closely related to the modern genus Cunninghamia, which is the most basal living member of the cypress family. Though there are some differences within the cones and leaves, they are very similar to each other and, as far as we know, one can proxy for the other easily. The little clade uniting these two originated in the Early Jurassic and proceeded to dominate humid environments throughout the Laurasian continents, especially from the Middle Jurassic through to the Early Cretaceous. Elatides seems to have gone extinct during or at the end of the Late Cretaceous, but Cunninghamia evolved in this epoch and continued to flourish until its range eventually regressed to China, Laos and Vietnam, where it can still be found today.
There's also the similar-looking genus of leafy shoot called Elatocladus, which is found throughout the Mesozoic. So in brief, this tree is incredibly suitable for a ton of the game’s formations.

Sources:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278075527_Whole-Plant_Reconstruction_and_Phylogenetic_Relationships_of_Elatides_zhoui_sp_nov_Cupressaceae_from_the_Early_Cretaceous_of_Mongolia
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195667116303287?via%3Dihub

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This is a cycad of the Zamiaceae family, very similar to the modern genus Bowenia which lives in the understory of the forests of Queensland, Australia. It was found as fossil leaves in the Anfiteatro de Ticó Formation of Argentina. This formation from the Aptian age (125 to 113 million years ago) doesn’t preserve any of our animals, so direct usage is impossible. However, if one plant is found in Patagonia in the Early Cretaceous and its descendant is found in Australia in the modern day, that might well imply that they had a Gondwanan distribution at one point. So the plant is probably suited for humid environments throughout South America, Antarctica, Australia and maybe Africa too. Standout animals with which to pair this plant are Argentinosaurus, Muttaburrasaurus and Leaellynasaura.

Sources:
https://bmcecolevol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12862-017-0943-x
https://mariocoiro.blog/2021/01/21/forgotten-formations-anfiteatro-de-tico/

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Ginkgos are seriously so cool. They’re the last remaining representative of a great, ancient and diverse clade of gymnosperms, which was especially dominant in the Triassic and Jurassic periods. Their closest living relatives are cycads which you can see in some aspects of their reproduction, but they’re much more shaped like "normal" trees, such as conifers and flowering plants.
The genus Ginkgo itself dates from the Middle Jurassic and was ever a fixture of disturbed environments near water, like humid slopes and levees. Their fruitlike seeds would have fed many a dinosaur. Their beautiful deciduous leaves are borne on two distinct types of shoots, short and long, which means that their branches stay very individually discernible even on large trees. Eventually, through being outcompeted by flowering plants (which reproduce and therefore evolve much more quickly—ginkgos take around 30 years!) and probably through some bad luck as well (like the extinction of their seed dispersers), their range started shrinking. Today, only the Chinese species Ginkgo biloba (Matt's favourite plant) is left.

This Jurassic Ginkgo species with multi-lobed leaves comes to us from the Middle Jurassic Yima Formation of eastern China. We don’t have any animals from here, but thankfully the leaf is of a shape that popped up more often. This plant can very convincingly proxy for Ginkgo apodes of the Yixian Formation, which means it’s suitable for Microraptor and the Psittacosaurus species.
It also looks like some species of Ginkgoites—a name given to ginkgo-like leaves found without reproductive structures—like G. pluripartita, G. huttonii, G. waarensis and G. australis, so I think it’s also suitable for animals like Iguanodon and Leaellynasaura (though in small amounts for that latter one, G. australis seems to have been on the decline already before).

Sources:
https://palaeoflora.blogspot.com/2023/10/too-many-ginkgo-leaves.html
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031018217306697?via%3Dihub
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0195667199901787

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Nilssonia is a name for entire or deeply incised leaves with a prominent central vein. Those are found throughout the whole Mesozoic and belonged to a plant which, based on the form of the stomata (microscopic pores used by plants for gas exchange), was related to modern cycads. It looked very different though, with a comparatively thin branching trunk.
At its zenith, this plant would’ve been present on all the northern continents as well as South America. By the Late Cretaceous, it could only be found up north in places like Siberia. Of course, those places had a temperate climate in those days, and the Nilssonia plant would’ve shed its leaves, given the lack of light in winter.

Nilssonia models coming to the game.

One criticism I have is that, given its relatives, it doesn't really make sense for this plant to have male and female reproductive structures on the same individual, like in the second largest model.

Sources:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0034666706001448
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0034666795001115

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Most tree ferns today belong to an order called the Cyatheales, but the habit has arisen multiple times. Case in point: this Todites, which belongs to the ancient family that also contains cinnamon ferns. It ranged from (possibly) the Late Permian to the Early Cretaceous. After that, it’s still useable as its close relative Todea, which is still around today in Oceania. The plant is especially useful for the wetter dinosaur formations of Southeast Asia, North America and Australia.

Sources:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016699505000999
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266876701_A_new_species_of_Todites_Pteridophyta_with_in_situ_spores_from_the_Upper_Permian_of_Pechora_Cis-Urals_Russia

So scrubland is a bit weird in that it... well, it mostly has trees. But this biome is one of the oldest ones in the game so it could be that we get a revamp at some point. If so, it'd be nice if we got some shrubs y'know.

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Norfolk Pine: A legitimate coastal plant! The models here are only immature trees are represented. A neat tree but adult trees look much different to the immature tree, so upsizing them can only go so far. The only represented member of the araucarian conifers, which were important in the Mesozoic and early Cenozic globally. Araucarian conifers will thrive in dry and seasonal conditions even in well draining soils. Araucaria species are not particularly fire sensitive and will will handle a blaze better than many angiosperms. In fact, in the case of the two South American species, fires will act to thin out their faster growing flowering competition. We have fossils and pollen that can be assigned to this family in the Late Triassic, including the petrified forest of the Chinle Formation. A suitable plant for dryland thickets and forests alike, although these tree models are way too small to break through a forest canopy and dominate a forest the way many Araucariaceae species do to this day.


In this exhibit based on the Huincul Formation, Norfolk pines (playing for team Araucariaceae in general) are present in the gallery forest (along the water course) and in thickets among rocky ground.

Aleppo Pine: The perfect pine for arid and hot conditions, perfect for scrubland and desert conditons from the Permian till the modern day.


In the Southern Morrison pen (inspired by the harsh environment of New Mexico during Morrison times) at night, a Torvosaurus moves through the hardy pine scrub.

Sabal Palmetto: Suitable for tropical and subtropical late Campanian formations such as the Kaiparowits, the much later late Maastrichtian formations like Hell Creek, and definitely suitable for all species of Smilodon.


Whether its a subtropical wooded grassland with fan palms or a tropical flood plain ravaged by flood and fire, fan palms thrive.

Foxtail Palm: A distinct plant with a limited range in real life. It stands out, so until they bring in Australian megafauna it's going to stick out to pedantic plant folk like myself. But it looks fantastic. When the trunk is lowered into the ground the foliage can proxy as cycads with a similar growth pattern to that of the foxtail palm's leaves such as Macrozamia stenomera.

Italian Sunflower: Gloriously ambiguous. The model of this plant can be used for scrubland, mammoth steppe (again, keep the taller plants off the steppe itself)… the flowerless version looks ambiguous enough without to be similar to some modern and bizarre low growing conifers, particularly in poor soils. Could be suitable for Mesozoic desert/dune environments.


The Italian sunflower playing the role of a hardy conifer or perhaps gnetale shrub in the herbivore segment of the Southern Morrison pen.

Aloe: Being a highly distinctive genus that is only 16 million years old, it is of limited value as of yet.

This is our first representative of the incredible Bennettitales, an order of seed plants which was very important for the bulk of Mesozoic ecosystems but which went completely extinct by (or at least around) the end of that era. Though their leaves were usually superficially similar to those of cycads, they had a very different reproductive morphology and may not have been that related. Those classically put into the family Williamsoniaceae also grew in a very different way, not as a single undivided trunk but with a type of equal-split branching known as divarication.

Among the most cycad-like bennettite leaves is Zamites, which is known from almost the entire Mesozoic, and which was widespread across (mostly) the northern continents. As is typical in paleobotany, the fossil leaf is usually all that’s found. But we’re fortunate that there are also some beautiful fossils from Late Jurassic Japan, which show what sort of plant would’ve borne these leaves. It’s restored here as dioecious (meaning there are separate male and female plants), which is likely. The pollen is produced on the male plants by organs that look like flowers, and these ‘pseudoflowers’ were probably visited by pollinating animals.

Bennettites of this growth form may have mostly colonised disturbed areas at low altitudes with poor soils (sand, peat, ...), under a variety of moisture conditions (but nothing too arid). They declined greatly in the Late Cretaceous and then went extinct, and I’m still not over it. Competition from flowering plants may be to blame, what with their similar reproductive strategies and short life cycles.

Sources:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0224-5
https://bioone.org/journals/paleontological-research/volume-26/issue-2/PR200020/Kimuriella-gen-nov-Bennettitales-a-Whole-Plant-Bennettite-from-the/10.2517/PR200020.full
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12549-014-0157-9
https://softdinosaurs.net/2013/09/23/bennettite-paleoenvironments/
https://paleobiodb.org/classic/checkTaxonInfo?taxon_no=54570

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This bennettite, unlike Zamites, belonged to a family which had unbranched, short, sort of bulbous trunks. Similar in that way to many cycads (which, again, it wasn't), hence the name meaning “cycad-like”. It was monoecious (meaning pollen and seeds are produced on the same plant), with reproduction being taken care of by bisexual flowerlike organs that grew in-between the leaf bases studding the trunk.
There were species all over North America, Eurasia and India during the Late Jurassic and Early Cretaceous. Their fossil trunks can be locally abundant and were even known to ancient peoples.
I can’t find anything on this plant’s ecology, but I think that something similar to Zamites (so, open environments) is likely.

Sources:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272594168_A_Revision_of_Wielandiella_angustifolia_a_Shrub-Sized_Bennettite_from_the_Rhaetian-Hettangian_of_Scania_Sweden_and_Jameson_Land_Greenland
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195667103001095?via%3Dihub

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The Gleicheniales are a fairly ‘primitive’ order of peculiar ferns, which, though still widespread in the tropics today, were more prominent in the Mesozoic. Chief among them is Gleichenia, the forked fern or coral fern. It has species mostly in Oceania, but fossils show that used to be all over the world. It evolved at least in the Jurassic, though fossils that are less clearly diagnosable to the living genus (named Korallipteris instead) are known from Triassic strata as well.
You can get away with these in all sorts of environments. Modern species of Gleichenia, at least, will mostly occur in disturbed environments with peaty or moisture-retaining soils, and can form rather monotypic stands. The fact that we have some browned models does, I think, make them useful for somewhat arid settings as well, where ferns will go dormant inbetween the rains.

Sources:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0016699512000411
https://www.nzpcn.org.nz/flora/species/gleichenia-microphylla/
https://paleobiodb.org/classic/checkTaxonInfo?taxon_no=175103

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A little bash-together of all the scrubland paleo plants.

The iconic araucarias are limited to South America and Oceania today, but at one point they were globally important trees. They’ve existed since at least the Jurassic. A. delevoryasii was a species from the upper member of the Morrison Formation, so it’s directly useful for animals like Apatosaurus and Dryosaurus. It’s known from cones, and from woody shoots with leaves. For the general shape of the tree, though, the game’s 3D modeler Nathan took inspiration from the modern species A. bidwillii (bunya) and A. araucana (monkey puzzle).

There’s quite some variation even between just the modern species of the genus, but if you squint then this model can proxy for species basically all over the world. Even where the genus isn’t precisely known, types of fossil foliage called Brachyphyllum and Pagiophyllum allude to its presence or that of similar trees. Araucaria only disappeared from the Northern hemisphere in the Cenozoic.

As for ecology, this is quite variable as well. All modern species save one are tropical, and are usually forest emergents. That means they take decades or centuries to eventually tower over the other tree species. Some are coastal, being tolerant of permeable soils and salty air. In the context of the Morrison, I would use this plant in the niches with medium humidity. Wetter places were occupied by ginkgos and Elatides, drier ones by conifers of the Pinaceae and Hirmeriellaceae families.

Sources:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285940556_A_mosaic_of_characters_in_a_new_whole-plant_araucaria_a_delevoryasii_gee_sp_nov_from_the_late_jurassic_morrison_formation_of_wyoming_usa
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031018210001458?via%3Dihub

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A now-extinct family of conifers called the Cheirolepidiaceae or Hirmeriellaceae was widespread and successful in the Mesozoic world. Most were cypress-like in that they had thin branches with decussate scale-like leaves, but their cones show them to be a different, more primitive lineage. These trees and shrubs occurred in all sorts of warm environments, but they were especially dominant in dry and/or salty places. Their presence is stated by their recognisable pollen grains called Classopollis.

The Hirmeriellaceae persisted throughout the entire Mesozoic before disappearing very early into the Cenozoic. Watsoniocladus specifically is known from the Jurassic and Early Cretaceous of Europe, Asia and Africa. As a typical member of its family though, you can use it basically anywhere and anytime. Except maybe at high latitudes.

Sources:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0034666782900380
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0034666721001433
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0034666725000417#bb0890

A cave bear explores a European beech forest, ca. 120.000 years before present.

Field Elm: Basically suitable for most standard tree-shaped trees of all periods. The canopy is suitable for tropical trees. Can proxy as ginkgos, or Caytoniales – a family of seemingly tree-shaped seed ferns which survived to the middle of the Cretaceous in Australia. It is hinted at that they may be present in the Dinosaur Park Formation. So far, so suitable for most paleoenvironments, when put in forests and woodlands. It makes a less convincing proxy as Agathis (kauris), Nageia (a podocarp with pretty much identical leaves to kauris but it has fleshy round fruit) or the extinct voltziale Krassilovia (Voltziales were a primitive order of conifers, that rather unhelpfully has leaves that are identical to both Nageia and Agathis, further complicating any form of identification).

Holm Oak: Suitable for temperate and subtropical forests throughout the Cenozoic. The presence of acorns really limits your options.

Paper Birch: A suitable tree for temperate northern hemisphere forests from the Late Cretaceous onwards. Birches are pioneer species, mostly living in younger forests. They have multiple adaptations for cold tolerance, including their white bark, making them some of the most northerly growing flowering trees.

Beech Tree: Beeches are a wide spread family of trees that now grow in North America and Eurasia. They seem to have diverged from their closest relatives by the middle of the Campanian. Some of their earlier diverging relatives are the extremely similar looking Southern Beeches, which are present, in the modern day, in New Guinea, Australia, New Caledonia, New Zealand and South America. Until about 30 million years ago they would have been present on Antarctica as well.

Eared Willow: A species of willow from Europe that grows as a shrub. While it is extremely suitable for Late Pleistocene megafauna, it could also be used to proxy as other species of flowering shrub possibly into the Late Cretaceous.

Fountain bamboo: Although Fountain bamboo is a temperate species hailing from China, similar bamboos grow globally in tropical and subtropical regions, including tropical South America, up to South East North America, Africa, Southern Asia through to oceania and Northern Australia. Temperate species are common in East Asia. There was some plants which were related to bamboo by the end of the Cretaceous, but it is likely that bamboo itself evolved during the Eocene or early Oligocene.

Flame Azalea: Azaleas are a group within the genus Rhododendron, which grow in the Himalayas, North America and Australia. They evolved some time around the middle of the Eocene. Although, it could additionally be used to proxy for earlier species of flowering plants.

Arrowwood: A very suitable shrub and ground cover for forests from the middle of the Cretaceous onwards. Looks like a run-of-the-mill angiosperm shrub. It's good. If it is used to proxy as a relative of the modern primitive angiosperm Amborella, which lives in New Caledonia, it could be suitable for any Late Triassic to Late Cretaceous forest.

Clover: A suitable ground cover for moist forests from the middle of the Cretaceous onwards. The version without the flowers can be floated on top of the water to proxy as Marsilea ferns, a genus of aquatic fern that looks like a clover but grows like a lily pad. Australian species thrive in desert conditions, able to sprout up and reproduce whilst water is present and stay in the ground for decades between rains, so if you have a few small puddles in a desert pen they will make a suitable garnish.

Foxglove: Very suitable for later Cenozoic, Miocene aged and onwards forest edges and meadows in North America and Eurasia.

Creeping Ivy: Suitable for Aptian period forests and thickets onwards. Many modern temperate vines have their origins in the warm and moist riverside forests and thickets of the Cretaceous.

Daisy Grass: Daisies (Bellis) are members of the Asteraceae, aka the sunflower family. These are very derived eudicot flowering plants. They originated in the Late Cretaceous in South America, and don't seem to have left Gondwana or evolved most of their current diversity by the end of the Mesozoic. For that reason, we suggest only using these in Cenozoic habitats.

Dandelion Grass: Dandelion (Taraxacum) is another member of the sunflower family. There are many modern asterids which have evolved convergently with the dandelion and share similar leaf shapes, growth forms, flowers and seeds, so in the modern world and the later Cenozoic, you can use them in a lot of places.

Field Grass: While grasslands became a biome in their own right in the Oligocene, there is fossil evidence of grasses being eaten and digested by sauropods during the Maastrichtian in both South America and India.

Some pretty ginkgos.

This Ginkgo is basically identical to the modern species (which in all likelihood evolved directly from it) and is found from the Late Cretaceous through to the Miocene. It lived in North America and Eurasia. I wouldn’t use this one before the Late Cretaceous, because ginkgos from before then were much more often lobed or dissected in their leaves.

Fun fact (well, it’s fun to me okay): fallen Ginkgo leaves are the substrate of a fungus called Bartheletia which is as much of a living fossil as the tree is! Looks like they went through a lot together.

Sources:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1871174X0900002X#bib44
Paleobotany: The Biology and Evolution of Fossil Plants, Second Edition by Thomas N. Taylor, Edith L. Taylor & Michael Krings
https://www.ajes.at/images/AJES/archive/Band%20108_2/meller_et_al_ajes_108_2.pdf

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The cinnamon fern genus dates from the Triassic, and the living species is over 70 million years old! In fact, multiple members of the family, which is the among the earliest-separating fern groups still around, have stayed remarkably unchanged for some 200 million years.
This big & pretty fern can be placed in clonal colonies in swamps and wet forests. It’s not tolerant of constant waterlogging, but it loves moisture.

In the modern day, the plant is known from North America and Asia. There’s fossil species and close relatives known from the Triassic of Australia and Antarctica, though. In conclusion: place it everywhere.

Sources:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1249884
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5508817/
https://bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.2307/2446424

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Though nowadays it only contains the one genus, the family of plane trees/sycamores used to be more diverse. There’s this Platanites, for example, which is very similar to plane trees except that its leaves are compound. Those leaves are mostly known from North America, starting in the Campanian and continuing into the Eocene. There’s also, however, occurrences in Scotland and perhaps China (if the Paleobiodb page for Platanites marginata is to be trusted).
I’d use it as a large tree down in the floodplains of the Hell Creek Formation, and it seems likely for the Dinosaur Park, Kaiparowits and Horseshoe Canyon formations as well. The Yuliangze Formation (Charonosaurus) could fit too, but that’s speculation.

Sources:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/org/science/article/abs/pii/S1058589325000045
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/284890334_Morphology_and_phylogenetic_significance_of_the_angiosperm_Platanites_hebridicus_from_the_Palaeocene_of_Scotland
https://paleobiodb.org/classic/checkTaxonInfo?taxon_no=55905
https://paleobiodb.org/classic/checkTaxonInfo?taxon_no=337679

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Trochodendroides is a leaf genus from the Albian age (113 to 100.5 million years ago) and later. It’s common in northern parts of North America and Asia, as well as Greenland, especially in the Campanian to Maastrichtian and after the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs.
The genus has many species, and the diverse but fairly generic heart-shaped to lanceolate leaves can be assigned to multiple families. This includes the Cercidiphyllaceae, a relict family from Asia. However, another whole-plant concept (or at least association with fruit) that bears them is Nordenskioldia, which is what these plants are based on. In this plant, the leaves alternate in one plane, and the terminally placed flowers have many stamens but no petals or sepals. The family is Trochodendraceae, which is placed basally in the eudicot group of flowering plants. Nordenskioldia fruits are also known from the Cretaceous, although most are from the Paleogene and some are still found in Miocene North America. There’s also fossil wood (Tetracentronites) though, pointing to the presence of a plant like this starting from the Albian.

In the modern day, these models can be used fairly well as (young) Tetracentron sinense, from Southeast Asia. The small family’s other living genus, Trochodendron, looks quite different in its leaves and leaf arrangement.

I think this plant is incredibly useful for Late Cretaceous temperate to subtropical formations in North America and Asia, and it might be good for Juxia as well.

Sources:
https://www.evolvingearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/trocho_intljournplantsci_2007.pdf
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/245502889_Nordenskioldia_and_Trochodendron_Trochodendraceae_from_the_Miocene_of_Northwestern_North_America
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240820667_Reproductive_and_Vegetative_Structure_of_Nordenskioldia_Trochodendraceae_a_Vesselless_Dicotyledon_from_the_Early_Tertiary_of_the_Northren_Hemisphere
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262918551_The_genus_Trochodendroides_Berry_in_the_Cretaceous_fl_oras_of_Siberia (Google translated)

Coconut Palm: The quintessential beach tree came about after the end of the Mesozoic, by conventional thought, although it appears that there may be evidence for coconut-like fruit being preserved in India before the end of the Maastrichian. Until we get some Maastrichian-aged Gondwanan creatures from around the paleotropics (such as Rajasaurus or Isisaurus) it is not suitable for any dinosaurs, although it is suitable for Paraceratherium bugtiense. Both of the smaller coconut tree models can be used as cycads similar to the Triassic Leptocycas, the modern Cuban Microcycas, or the modern Australian Cycas armstrongii


Scaevola: Despite being almost exclusively coastal, this flowering plant can proxy as more typical rainforest plants and ground covers, from the Early Cretaceous onwards.


Elephant Ear: This plant's family has its origins in the late Campanian, and the tropical rainforests of the Kaiparowits formation are a suitable environment for it.

Fan Palms and Lady Palms: As suitable for under the forest canopy as it is for more wide open areas. Use it liberally in tropical and subtropical Campanian, Maastrichtian and Pleistocene habitats.

Kapok: Suitable for more modern tropical environments, since even by the late Maastrichtian most habitats were still dominated by large conifers. That said, logs 40-60 cm around of trees like Javelinoxylon (meaning “Log from Javelina”) – which were in the order Malvales just like modern kapoks and also had buttressed roots and long branchless trunks – were probably quite common in the gallery forests of the late Maastrichtian on the drier and warmer flood plains of what is now New Mexico. They were probably in Texas too, although good fossils are not known from Texas). The trees grew alongside sabal-like fan palms, and in these forests or nearby on the flood plain grew araucarian conifers which likely would have been much taller. The models of the plant make them much more suitable for many non-malvale Mesozoic angiosperms in warm and humid environments, from the Early to mid-Cretaceous.

Palm Seedling: As suitable for under the forest canopy as it is for more wide open areas. Use it liberally in tropical and subtropical Campanian and Maastrichtian and Pleistocene habitats.

Also suitable to proxy as Zamia-like cycads, low growing and drought hardy cycads that are suitable, again, for under the forest canopy or in more open and drier areas. I've added cylinders of pebbles that will look like seeds from a distance.

Samanea: Suitable to fill in for early angiosperms of the mid-Cretaceous such as primitive laurels or rosid trees etc. They are eually suitable for open areas and in drier habitats.

Banana Tree: Not really a great proxy, although it may have been present by the late cretaceous and thus is suitable for the Kaiparowits formation.

Bromeliads [gardening]: Suitable to proxy as other similar rainforest plants, in most late-Mesozoic to Cenozoic tropical environments such as the Kaiparowits formation.

Palm Grass: I am going to complain about the model: the leaves are nowhere near broad enough. Suitable to proxy as other similar rainforest plants, in most tropical enviroments such as in the Kaiparowits formation.

Monstera: The ancestors of Monstera have their roots in the tropics of the Campanian, so it maybe suitable for the Kaiparowits formation.

Elephant grass [gardening]: This tall hybrid grass, also called giant miscanthus, is fairly useful as a generic grass, especially its nonflowering version. It can be used in wet tropical settings as far back as the Maastrichtian age.

Orchids [gardening]: Suitable as small tropical flowers from the Early Cretaceous onwards in well-watered areas.

Jungle Vines [gardening]: Suitable from the Early Cretaceous on wards in tropical and humid conditions as angiosperm vines. Now, in the modern day, we have a genus of fairly typical-looking tropical vine with many species world wide known as Gnetum. It is in fact part of a sister group to conifers (its closest living relatives, though you'd never know from looking at them and this really hints that they had a much bigger diversity of forms in the past), and its ancestors would have split maybe in the early or mid-Permian.

Jungle Floor: A mix of low growing ferns, which are suitable for damp locations in most habitiats, or even well draining sites in humid areas. Could also be used for ground cover in a Mesozoic fern prairie, especially during the wet season.

Crow’s Nest Fern: Crow’s nest ferns are a group of tropical ferns in the huge genus Asplenium. The different species range from the southern Japanese islands, Southeast Asia, Oceania including Hawaii, to South America. There’s also the much smaller but similar temperate species of Asplenium called Hart's Tongue – which the crow’s nest could proxy as if the small model is used – which grows in temperate woodlands in Europe, Asia, the northwestern Africa and with a scattered distribution in the US. Crow’s nest ferns will grow on trees, rocks and the ground in humid areas, hart's tongue commonly grows on stone. Crow’s nest ferns will survive in full sun and survive dry periods. Hart’s tongue tends to grow in shaded positions, especially in lower-latitude parts of its range.

I have not found any material regarding the evolution of Asplenium ferns. But with the fact the family has a global distribution and a wide variety of forms, it's likely that it evolved during the Mesozoic. Ferns have evolved for 390 million years, and I think that the basic leaf design of crow's nest and hart’s tongue fern would have evolved in the past, most likely in species that grow in shaded areas. I think it's likely that these traits would have been present in some prehistoric species and families that have not made it through till the modern day, and there is also evidence for epiphytic (meaning plants specialised for growing in trees) ferns dating back to the Early Jurassic in Europe.

King Fern: These huge ferns from the family Marattiaceae mostly inhabit Southeast Asia, Australia and the tropical islands of the South Pacific, in the modern day, but they were quite widespread in the Mesozoic, with spores being found across the globe in all periods of that era. Modern species need a lot of moisture to keep their massive fronds erect (up to 9 meters in Angiopteris evecta!), and so they mostly grow in gullies and near streams. Ancient king ferns may have been more diverse in habitat.

Though the species of cycads that live today only evolved in the Cenozoic, there is something to be said for the plants' status as a ‘living fossil’. Case in point: Leptocycas from the Triassic of America and China which mostly looks as though you could encounter it today. People have specifically compared it to the modern genus Dioon. The bark also reminds me of some species of Cycas.

The leaf morphology is separately called Pseudoctenis, and may have been a recurring form among multiple lineages. It’s known from all through the Mesozoic and even the Permian. It was also everywhere. I wouldn’t hesitate to use this plant for basically any formation prior to the latest Cretaceous, including at higher latitudes where cycads don’t grow these days. In the landscape, you can put it in drier spots (though not too dry) and in poor soil (since cycads (modern ones at least) get help from nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria).

An absolutely baller fossil of Leptocycas, showing what a bearer of Pseudoctenis looks like. Source publication by J.-W. Zhang et al. which is my second source in the list below.

Sources:
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/peabody_museum_natural_history_postilla/150/
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1759-6831.2010.00079.x
https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.19010
https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/seedplants/cycadophyta/cycadlh.html

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Agathis, aka kauri tree, is a genus of tropical conifer that is in the same family as monkey puzzle trees. It has species in the Phillipines, Indonesia and northern parts of Oceania, with its diversity hotspot being the islands of New Caledonia.
The earliest definite occurrence of Agathis is in the Paleocene—so after the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs—but keep in mind that plant fossils of different organs aren’t usually found in association. Leaves like those of Agathis—broad, stiff and parallel-veined— are known from throughout the Mesozoic, they just aren’t associated with the cones that would identify them as this genus. Those leaves are called Podozamites on their own, and they’re actually borne by multiple kinds of conifers, so it’s essential to keep the distinction.

One bearer of Podozamites is Nageia, which is also still alive in the tropics of Asia. Similar leaves, different reproductive structures. The fossil record of this genus (as evidenced via fossils of leaves and cones in connection) goes back to the Early Cretaceous of Japan.

Another is Krassilovia, which unlike Nageia is a more primitive conifer not that closely related to Agathis. It can be used across the northern hemisphere in the Triassic, Jurassic and Early Cretaceous, and would’ve held a swamp niche similar to the bald cypress. These went extinct in the Late Cretaceous.

In summary, you can use this tree all over the world starting from the Triassic, in subtropical and tropical forests and swamps. Its range shrinks over the course of the Cretaceous towards Asia and Oceania.

Sources:
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/pjab1977/64/8/64_8_213/_article
https://www.indefenseofplants.com/blog/2021/1/19/krassilovia-an-amazing-cretaceous-conifer
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0226779
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311607868_Swedenborgia_nissleri_a_characteristic_conifer_from_the_Middle_Triassic_German_Hauptsandstein

Chloranthaceae is one of the earliest-diverging families of flowering plants, and needless to say it’s ancient. Fossils seemingly date back to the Barremian age (129.4 to 125 million years ago) of the Early Cretaceous. In the following ages, Chloranthaceae plants become widely known from places including Sweden, Portugal, the US, and even Antarctica and Australia. They were very successful, living both in the forest understorey and in recently disturbed areas, though never far from a source of moisture.
Their presence may also be stated by pollen genera like Asteropollis, Clavatipollenites and Pennipollis, though associations between plants and pollen in the fossil record aren’t easy to make.
Modern members of this family share many traits and the models can conceivably pass as any one of them. That means they’re still useful for the modern day in tropical Asia, Central and South America as well as Madagascar.

Sources:
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/701819
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12229-018-9197-6
https://www.app.pan.pl/article/item/app006972019.html

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The order of laurels is another ancient one, dating from at least the Aptian age of the Early Cretaceous. It contains a lot of diversity but the leaves tend to be quite simple (though some have a few lobes) and pleasantly aromatic. The simplicity of those leaves means that these models can be used as a whole bunch of species, both extinct and extant, including some that aren’t even in the order.
Just a few examples:

• Paraperseoxylon septatum, fossil wood from the Cretaceous of Argentina.
• Rogersia longifolia from the Albian of the US.
• Catula gettyi from the Kaiparowits Formation.
• Marmarthia pearsonii, fossil leaves from Hell Creek.
• Laurophyllum leaves from like, the whole Cenozoic, everywhere. Just look it up. Also known from the Americas and Africa in the Late Cretaceous.
• modern laurels and relatives such as Laurus, Peumus, Cinnamomum, Idiospermum from Australia (which in itself is known to be a Cretaceous relic) etc. etc. Too many to name.

In summary, this is definitely one of the most useful flowering plants in the game, especially with its smaller models. The fact that they’re so ubiquitous might be to do with the fact that laurel leaves are often leathery, which means they fossilise better.
Fun fact: in the Cenozoic, before the Tethys sea dried up, southern Europe was covered in a subtropical moist forest type dominated by plants of this order, called laurisilva.

Sources:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195667115000786#bib51
Saurian: a Field Guide to Hell Creek
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0034666703000927
https://paleobiodb.org/classic/checkTaxonInfo?taxon_no=54622
https://x.com/PalaeoJules/status/1829469079339442245/photo/1
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358015827_Insect_herbivory_on_Catula_gettyi_gen_et_sp_nov_Lauraceae_from_the_Kaiparowits_Formation_Late_Cretaceous_Utah_USA
https://palaeo-electronica.org/content/2018/2270-early-cretaceous-leaves

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This name technically belongs to a floral axis bearing fruit. Archaeanthus as a whole-plant concept is associated with Archaepetala (perianth) and Liriophyllum (leaves). It’s interpreted as a relative of the modern tulip tree, itself the closest living relative of the magnolia. It’s known from the latest Albian of Kansas, so around a hundred million years ago. There’s another species of Liriophyllum from the Bahariya Formation of Egypt, though the double apex that characterises this leaf is less pronounced here.
There’s also fossil leaves called Liriodendrites, which are closely enough related that you can use these models just as well. These are found in the Late Cretaceous of North America (Hell Creek) and northern Asia. Given the connectedness of these realms, I don’t doubt that it had a broad distribution in these continents.

The plant is less convincing as the modern tulip tree genus Liriodendron, which is also known from the Cretaceous, because that one has yellow flowers.

Sources:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2399030
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1759-6831.2009.00058.x
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225631379_Genus_Liriodendrites_in_Cretaceous_and_Early_Paleogene_Floras_of_Northern_Asia
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225631379_Genus_Liriodendrites_in_Cretaceous_and_Early_Paleogene_Floras_of_Northern_Asia
https://bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3732/ajb.1300035
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9886267/

some Iguanodon come to drink at a lakeshore in the Wealden. Bald cypresses are standing in for earlier relatives, and I'm using squished down clover as an aquatic fern.

Bald Cypress: Present during the later stages of the Cretaceous, it remains present unchanged in North America from the Campanian onwards in the waterside communities of nearly every formation (aside from Prince Creek where it seems to not have displaced the more ancient Krassilovia conifers). There are also similar leaf and cone shapes dating back to the Jurassic. This tree is also suitable to proxy as its more land-loving relatives, just sink the plant into the ground to obscure any protruding aerial roots. I personally think it would be really nice to have the bald cypress available in autumn colours as it is a deciduous tree and looks quite spectacular.

Swamp Beech: Suitable for representing early angiosperm trees from the middle of the Cretaceous onwards such as laurels etc. Suitable for swamps, riverside forests etc.


A section of the Cloverly Wetland pen.

Reeds, Cattails & Papyrus: Present by the the start of the Campanian, so pretty appropriate for all your big charismatic Late Cretaceous dinosaurs.


A Maastrichtian marshland.

Horsetails: Suitable for wetland areas during the whole Mesozoic and through to the modern day. Can be upsized substantially to represent giant species.

Lily Pads: Suitable for the wetlands of the Early Cretaceous onward.

Water Hyacinth/Pickerel Weed and Arrow Arum: Relatives of these monocots are present in the tropical jungle of the Kaiparowits Formation and they're suitable for representing aquatic and land plants in many tropical settings.

Amazonian Lily Pad: Very distinct modern plant, of limited utility for scientific accuracy. Might be suitable for the Luján formation during inter glacial periods in the past when the climate would have been more subtropical than it is today.

Mangrove Tree: A member of Rhizophoraceae, the sprawling stilt legged mangrove trees —as opposed to mangrove palms and members of Acanthaceae that also grow as mangrove trees. These trees form the margins of tropical and subtropical river or estuary areas that get flooded with salt water regularly. Rhizophoraceae diversified drastically, and seemed to achieve a global distribution, in the wake of the Eocene Thermal Maximum.

An official teaser image showing off the wetland plants alongside Spinosaurus.

The water ferns or Salviniales are quite unique and derived as far as ferns go, and their fossil record only goes back to the Late Jurassic at the earliest. Marsilea itself is an amphibious representative, rooting in submerged soils and sending up leaves that look like four-leaf clovers. These can float on the water’s surface or emerge above it.
The earliest fossil of the family looks like the still-living Regnellidium which has only two leaflets instead. Still, not much later, something looking more like Marsilea thrived in the Bahariya Formation. I would say they’re suited for lakes, ponds and marshes, including seasonally dry ones, worldwide starting from around the middle of the Cretaceous.

Sources:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235708368_Late_Cretaceous_equatorial_coastal_vegetation_new_megaflora_associated_with_dinosaur_finds_in_the_Bahariya_Oasis_Egypt
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249158432_Regnellites_nagashimae_gen_et_sp_nov_the_Oldest_Macrofossil_of_Marsileaceae_from_the_Upper_Jurassic_to_Lower_Cretaceous_of_Western_Japan

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This small extinct fern is probably a sister clade of the group containing Marsilea and the free-floating ferns Azolla and Salvinia. Mostly, it’s very similar to Marsilea, except that it has more generically fern-like fronds. In my view, it was probably a submerged aquatic plant, or else growing in very shallow water or wet soils. My reasoning: looking at the fossils, its fronds don't have very long stalks, so there's not much distance between the rhizomes (which would’ve been in soil) and where the pinnae start. The general frond shape also doesn't seem very adapted for floating.

The plant is only known from a few locations in Late Cretaceous North America, as far as I can tell. It doesn’t seem like that much attention has gone to it though, I’d be curious to find out where else it might’ve been found.

Sources:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2445498?seq=2
https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/807133f3-fd6f-4d36-b1c9-d6bb77b67cbd/content

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Despite looking something like a water lily, the lotus is only distantly related. It belongs to the Proteales, one of the early-branching eudicot flowering plants, and an important group from the Cretaceous through to today.
The lotus lineage had diverged from that of sycamore trees at least by the Aptian age of the the Early Cretaceous. By the Late Cretaceous, it was a common plant in slow-moving waters all over the northern hemisphere. It’s not a fully floating plant, so only place it in very shallow water.

Sources:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07324-0
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-33356-z

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This flowering plant rooted in aquatic soils and was heterophyllous (having more than one form of leaves): it had both slender bifurcating submerged leaves and a rosette of rounder floating leaves. In that way, it resembles the modern Cabomba plant, though its actual affinity is a bit mysterious.

These models unfortunately don't have the submerged leaves, though that won't really matter until the rendering of underwater elements gets fixed. Anyway though, I think if you combine this plant with some submerged horsetails below it, they'll look spot on.

Quereuxia flourished in the Late Cretaceous and Paleogene of the Northern hemisphere, and so will not look out of place in swamps and lakeshores alongside Nelumbo and Cobbania.

Sources:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195667121000823?via%3Dihub
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285820884_The_Campanian_Grunbach_Flora_of_Lower_Austria_Palaeoecological_interpretations

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The Araceae family of monocots has given rise to free-floating plants like duckweed and water cabbage. Among them is this ancient representative known from formations like Dinosaur Park and Hell Creek. It formed rosettes of floating leaves connected by stolons (horizontal stems) in ponds and swamps.
It’s often found in large numbers so it was probably locally dominant, not unlike its modern relatives which can be quite aggressive. But don’t hesitate to combine it with Nelumbo and Quereuxia, which would’ve stuck more to the shoreline rather than overgrowing the whole body of water like Cobbania.

As far as we know, it’s only suited for the Campanian and Maastrichtian ages of North America and Eastern Asia.

Sources:
https://bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.3732/ajb.94.4.609
Saurian: a Field Guide to Hell Creek
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308041166_Evaluating_Relationships_among_Floating_Aquatic_Monocots_A_New_Species_of_Cobbania_Araceae_from_the_Upper_Maastrichtian_of_South_Dakota
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/lxO2Oa

You’ve probably noticed the pattern by now, that names ending in -ites are used for fossils that resemble a modern genus but which can’t be assigned to them with confidence, usually because reproductive structures are missing. It’s normally no different with this Equisetites.

Except… in this case it is. This plant is specifically Equisetites arenaceus, of which reproductive structures are known. There was no single “strobilus” (cone) on the stem’s apex like with modern horsetails; instead, it had whorls of fertile branches, similarly organised as the normal sterile branches you also see on most horsetails, but each ending in some cones.

It’s known from the Middle and Late Triassic of Europe, so it's suitable for Plateosaurus. It would’ve rapidly colonised riverbanks and ponds via vegetative reproduction. I don’t think it would be too out of place up until the Early Jurassic.

Sources:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272253882_Kelber_K-P_van_Konijnenburg-van_Cittert_JHA_1998_Equisetites_arenaceus_from_the_Upper_Triassic_of_Germany_with_evidence_for_reproductive_strategies_-_Review_of_Palaeobotany_and_Palynology_100_1-26
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311440217_The_development_of_horsetails_in_the_Mesozoic

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Weichselia reticulata was a strange tree fern, up to 8 and a half meters high, that lived from the Middle Jurassic to the early Late Cretaceous, and achieved an almost global distribution in the Cretaceous. Its splaying leaf architecture (with so-called “pedate fronds”) reminds of the ancient Matoniaceae family of ferns, but all the same, its placement is uncertain. Its rachis, when found in isolation, is called Paradoxopteris.
We don’t know for sure whether the plant was xeromorphic (=drought-adapted) or instead more suited to swamps and estuaries, but its discovery in varied environments suggests that there may have been morphs or species for both conditions. The developers went with the latter environment, but you can of course sink the roots to use these plants in drier conditions. We also don't know for sure that it stood upright, since the trunks found were curved, but it's a reasonable reconstruction.
What’s certain is that the plant was fire-adapted and would have been very abundant in places that are often disturbed by the blaze.

It is especially suitable for dinosaurs found around the Tethys sea in the Early Cretaceous; that is, Iguanodon, Carcharodontosaurus and Spinosaurus.

Sources:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016699517301006
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/spp2.1344

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Dawn redwoods are deciduous water-loving trees, common in the non-tropical northern hemisphere during the Late Cretaceous through to the Eocene (which was really hot, so it was pushed into high latitudes). These trees are large but not enormous, unlike the other redwoods, and they're as comfortable with their feet in the water as they are on land. They're suited for the environments of many Late Cretaceous North American and Asian dinosaurs. Place them in swamps and as dominant elements of low-lying floodplain forests. The modern species Metasequoia glyptostroboides is a relict only native to a few regions of China, and was only discovered in the 1940s.

When you hide their buttresses by sinking them into the ground, the fall variants of these dawn redwoods can proxy as other deciduous conifers, such as Parataxodium.

A hot North African Desert. (Argentinosaurus is standing in for Paralititan)

Bloodwood: A tree that inhabits arid and infertile areas of Australia. A suitable proxy for arid land and scrubland angiosperms from the Eocene Thermal Maximum onwards. A good angiosperm counterpoint to the Aleppo pine.

Saguaro, Prickly Pear & Barrel Cacti: Useful for American desert scenes of the Cenozoic.

Yucca: Perhaps can be sunken into the ground to act as a bennettitale, an order of bizzare “flowering” cycad-like gymnosperms from the Early Jurassic to the Cretaceous mass extinction.

Saxaul: This flowering desert shrub comes from north Africa to central Asia. It looks suitable as a stunted desert plant of many stripes, including cheirolepid conifers, a family of arid-adapted cypress-like plants that were fire resistant and very common in dry or salty environments in the Mesozoic.
Shorter forms could seemingly proxy as Ephedra, a short grasslike or shrubby plant from the Late Triassic to the modern day. Even the larger forms are useable as certain species like the Argentinian E. boelckei. Today, Ephedra lives in many areas of the northern hemisphere (plus the Andes) and thrives in deserts and on mountains.


The saxaul is standing in for desert hardy gnetale or conifer shrubs in this desert scrubland based around the Kayenta formation. Coelophysis bauri is standing in for a much younger relative.

Joshua Tree: Useful for desert scenes of the Cenozoic USA.

Date Palm: Suitable for subtropical, tropical or arid Eurasian and African environments from about 50 million years ago to now. Reasonably common in tropical environments with plenty of water.
Suitable to proxy as many types of cycad similar to modern species of Cycas (from Asia), Encephalartos (from Africa) and Macrozamia (from Australia). These trees will often grow in groves in tropical and subtropical, semi arid and seasonal enviroments. As cycads often sprout pups from the trunk and base, placing the shorter palm in either of these areas will make the palm look more convincingly like a cycad.


An oasis in mid-Cretaceous North America.

A desert teaser image from June's dev diary.

Ephedras are shade-intolerant woody shrubs that can be found on almost every continent, in warm-temperate areas. In most species, leaves are reduced to small scales and the plant’s green stems are used for photosynthesis. Their tolerance for aridity means they’re mostly found in deserts and mountainous areas. These plants belong to the so-called gnetophytes, a deep-diverging group of truly weird gymnosperms that was more common in the Mesozoic. Even within the group, the living genera (being Ephedra, Gnetum and Welwitschia) diverged from each other incredibly long ago, and they’re very distinct as a result. Fossils basically identical to modern Ephedra are found throughout the Cretaceous, though extinct members of the same family are known from earlier too.

These models do look pretty weird to me, I have to admit.
Modern ephedras tend to have some more apical dominance, so the side branches won’t be as long as the main branch. The branches are also usually phototropic so they all curve towards the same direction (that being upwards). One of the two side branches at a node may also get aborted or not grow as vigorously as the other. That’s all factors which complicate the more mathematical ‘trident’-like branching you see here. The end result is something that looks ‘grassier’, for lack of a better term. That said, going by the fossils, some extinct relatives like Eamesia chinensis from the Yixian Formation (China) and Arlenea delicata from the Crato Formation (Brazil), do look to have this more trident-like branching pattern.
Update: a species called E. antisyphilitica (aka clapweed) has been brought to my attention. It does look a lot more like these models, so they're better than I gave them credit for. I still don't think the saxaul has lost its value as a proxy for other Ephedra species like E. viridis, E. chilensis etc., but these ones are pretty useful too.

Sources:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0034666725000351#s0035
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6116489/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468265923000872?via%3Dihub

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Here’s another gnetophyte; a relative of the modern Welwitschia mirabilis. That’s an incredibly weird plant from the Kaokoveld desert in Angola and Namibia. Above a long taproot for accessing deep water, it has a short trunk bearing just two massive leaves, which grow continuously at the base while withering at the ends. Their large surface area and twisty form is ideal for condensing the coastal desert’s morning mist. The leaves also fray and split at their whole lengths, giving the impression as a whole of a giant cone-bearing pile of dried seaweed in the sand. They have many adaptations for longevity, and can become thousands of years old.

Relatives of the now-unique plant (tentatively) include this Welwitschiophyllum from the Crato Formation of Early Cretaceous Brazil. This was a wetland in an otherwise arid environment. It differs from Welwitschia in having smaller, pointier (potentially more?) leaves that had some mediolateral curvature, which may have helped them stand more upright (that’s just my speculation though). Overall, I like these models.

Since Welwitschiophyllum is still pretty different from the modern Welwitschia, The former can’t really proxy for the latter well. I think maybe one or two models can convincingly pass for (young!) Welwitschia, the ones that look like they have two leaves.

It has stomata sunken into pits (which helps prevent water loss) and there is some potential genetic evidence that the modern plant’s ancestors would have also lived in deserts, so the use case is clear: the deserts and semi-arid places of western Gondwana. That means these could fit with Argentinosaurus, Spinosaurus, Carcharodontosaurus, Ouranosaurus, ...

Sources:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195667119303684
https://bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.3732/ajb.92.8.1294
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24528-4

The Cold Grasslands of the Mammoth Steppe.

Grasses as we now know them evolved at the very end of the Cretaceous and only became a dominant part of open environments during the Oligocene which started 33.9 MYA. Up until this point, it appears open environments largely consisted of heath, or low shrublands.

Acacia: Acacias seem to have established a worldwide distribution and dominance during the Eocene Thermal Maximum. Whilst these models represent specifically the thorny acacias of the African savanna they can be used to depict many species of dry and arid tree, both other acacias and unrelated species. The thorny acacia even has a similar growth form to some of the rare cypress trees growing in the middle of the modern Sahara, so it could easily proxy for some hardy desert conifer from the Triassic onward.

Tarwort: A dry grassland/desert shrub from the Chihuahuan desert. Tarwort is an asterid, which are of the eudicots, the main group of flowering plants and one of the first to diverge. I'd think the model is usful for any scrubby or deciduous kind of flowering plant from the Early Cretaceous onwards. I really like this model and can see a lot of use for it!


Tarwort proxies as a scrubby coastal Hibiscus or similar beach dweller.

Digitaria Grass: Primarily a tropical grass digitara is suitable for dry and moist enviroments. As perfect for a dry tropical savanna as it is for a rainforest clearing, or as the ground cover in an open woodland. It could feasibly be used to proxy as rice, which was present by the end of the Cretaceous in India.

Marula: I personally love the idea of my dinosaurs eating the overripe fruit and getting intoxicated, as has been documented in modern wildlife in Africa. The tree is native to Madagascar and most of Sub-Saharan Africa. It would likely have been around during the Pleistocene. The tree in general is pretty hard to fault as a tropical angiosperm, and similar trees would have been present during the mid-Cretaceous.


Marula proxies as a mangrove with pneumatophore roots (the type with many small pencil roots) such as the modern mangrove apple (Sonneratia caseolaris)

Pampas Grass: A tussock grass common in the cooler and dryer areas of South and Central America. Although there’s also similar plants from around the world, most notably the tussock forming snow grass and toetoe from New Zealand. I am not sure the age of such grasses but they seem common at low latitudes in the southern hemisphere, it is very likely that this is because of the global wind currents and the wind dispersal of seeds so this dispersal is likely quite recent.


Grass and Shrubland in the La Brea pen.

Triodia Grass: Also called spinifex. A grass that likely dates back to the Pliocene in Australia as the continent started to dry out. Spinifex thrives in arid and dry conditions on impoverished soil. I really like the model. It's not a really excellent representation of spinifex (which is usually highly distictive by forming tight little balls, or rings, it’s very distinctive and very weird (and prickly as heck)). Instead, this model is perfect for representing literally the majority of grassland grasses since their rise in the Oligocene.
The smaller model, when shrunk a little and placed underwater, can also represent Isoetes. This is a peculiar aquatic lycophyte that is still around today but dates from the Jurassic.

As written in the June dev diary, for paleobotany the devs have decided to view 'grassland' as a bit of a broader term, more like 'savannah'. After all, grass hadn't evolved for the majority of the Mesozoic, and open habitats were instead colonised by a variety of ferns, cycads, bennettites, gnetophytes etc.

 

This is an extinct member of the Schizaeales, one of the more ancient orders of ferns that still has representatives. This order has some weirdos in it, but Ruffordia is of the family Anemiaceae which is fairly normal-looking as far as ferns go. It has creeping rhizomes (see also the entries on Coniopteris, Korallipteris and Aculea) and separate fertile and sterile fronds. It may fit into the extant genus Anemia (though the spores are a bit different), so this looks to be another case in ferns where morphology has been conserved since at least the Cretaceous. Anemia is a diverse genus and occurs in a broad range of habitats —from moist to arid, from shaded to open— though it is mostly confined to the tropics. Based on that, I think you can use Ruffordia basically anywhere in the Late Jurassic to Early Cretaceous: South America, Africa, Europe, East Asia, … Afterwards, its range would’ve probably decreased somewhat. It’s also useable in earlier times since vaguely similar forms are known throughout the Mesozoic (including under the form genus Sphenopteris).

Sources:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195667114002171#bib13 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195667124001915#sec3 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249027353_Phylogeny_and_biogeography_of_Ruffordia_Mohria_and_Anemia_Schizaeaceae_and_Ceratopteris_Pteridaceae_evidence_from_in_situ_and_dispersed_spores

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This is one of the weirdos I referred to in the Ruffordia entry. It looks similar (in fronds if not so much in spores) to certain species of the modern genus Schizaea like S. dichotoma, so we know that the profusely branching fronds of that type also date back to the Cretaceous. Specifically, Schizaeopsis is described from the Aptian of the eastern US.
Under the earlier names Baieropsis and Acrostichopteris, it’s also known from the Late Jurassic, and from Europe and Asia as well. I think it’s not too speculative for the Morrison Formation on that basis.

As for the modern day… Schizaeopsis’ two modern relatives, Schizaea and Actinostachys, occur almost worldwide in subtropical and tropical areas. They occupy all kinds of environments, from swampland to open forest to heath. Keep in mind, though, that not all of them look that much like their fossil relative.

Sources:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0034666701001282
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/54474105#page/274/mode/1up
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1547358?origin=crossref&seq=1
https://paleobiodb.org/classic/checkTaxonInfo?taxon_no=179060
https://paleobiodb.org/classic/checkTaxonInfo?taxon_no=56109

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Ctenis is a form genus for cycad leaves ranging from the Triassic to the Eocene. It was especially widespread from the Middle Jurassic ‘till the Early Cretaceous. Found in the northern continents plus South America, it may not represent one genus but instead a form which was convergently evolved by multiple lineages, or kept around while other organs did change. It’s distinct from all modern cycads in that the leaves have anastomosing veins (meaning that veins will both split and rejoin, as seen from the base to the tip, creating a network). The devs have decided to make it a plant with a subterranean stem, which is a habit you see in some modern cycads too like some species of Zamia. I love the detail that some younger fronds have red pigments, to protect them from the sun as they establish!
Don’t hesitate to use this plant throughout the Mesozoic, including at high latitudes, in all sorts of open environments, whether wet or somewhat dry.

Sources:
https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nph.19010
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271199940_Ctenis_clarnoensis_sp_n_an_Unusual_Cycadalean_Foliage_from_the_Eocene_Clarno_Formation_Oregon

So I won't be doing combinations of different plants or scenery items but those items that are intended to represent individual plant species. This means I'll download and have a look and play around with each one to make a fair review. Great work guys.

Asteroxylon: A small lycopsid from the Denovian. The plant itself and the model are suitable enough for any small rambling lycopsid from the Devonian to the present day. Lycposids prefer areas where a large amount of water flows through, but they will happily grow well in well draining soils.

Gondwanagaricites: Carries the form of a woodland/field mushroom. In seasonal environments, mushrooms will spread their spores shortly after rain.

Equisetites: A form genus for horsetails and their closest relatives. These would be suitable to give a bit of a change in texture when used alongside the smaller horsetails in game. More suitable for giant horsetail species.

Pleuromeia: An isoetale (“quillworts”, relatives of Lycopods (clubmosses) and Selaginella (spikemosses)) from the start of the Triassic. They seem to have formed monospecific stands in response to the massive greenhouse gas effect of the Permian-Triassic mass extinction. They seem to have grown ~2m tall. The model here has a long trunk; there’s reconstructions of both short and long stemmed Pleuromeia. They could possibly be used to proxy as larger relatives from the Carboniferous. They have been found worldwide.


A Carboniferous shore, the Pleuromeia trees and Neocalamites are proxying for older relatives. Obviously the Acrocanthosaurus is a little bit inaccurate. LOL.

Neocalamites: Commonly found on watersides and in coastal areas from the start of the Permian till the early Jurassic. Model is good, scaling up for some of the larger species (~5m tall)and changing orientation gives the best results.


Lycopia: A medium sized lycopsid from the mid-Triassic of Italy. The plant itself and the model are suitable enough for any small-sized lycopsid from the Devonian to the present day. Lycposids prefer areas where a large amount of water flows through but they will happily grow well in well draining soils. Also very suitable, if scaled up, to be used as a Pandanus in tropical settings from the Oligocene to the present.

Lesleya: A seed plant, possible basal gymnosperm and possible cycad ancestor from Iberia. Possibly suitable for the Carboniferous and Permian. Many plant families died out at the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, so it's a likely enough end point for this family of plants. It seems to have been a drought-adapted plant and is suitable for upland areas during these periods. Usually I'd say I am not a fan of the ropes for the trunk, but in every reconstruction I have found of the trunk does look like a pile of ropes.

Foliage? idk: Some cycad-shaped plants that will no doubt be useful for padding out most Mesozoic and some more modern habitats, especially in tropical climates.

Osmunda: A family of large ferns that evolved in the late Permian. A very common fern globally from the Triassic till the end of the Eocene, even today it still has a global distribution.

Bisonia niemii: A broad-leafed laurel from the Hell creek formation. The plant seems to be rather common in the Formation. This model is suitable for a sapling.

Pseudoflowered Williamsonia: A cycadeoid bennettite. A conservatively shaped bennettitale, perfectly common for cosmopolitan habitats from the early Triassic to the mid-Cretaceous. Pseudoflowers are a nice addition, in this family they seem to sprout out of the side of the trunk.
PS: it's weird that a bennie called Williamsonia would be in the Cycadeoideaceae instead of the Williamsoniaceae, but it seems W. sewardiana was misplaced.

Lycopodium sp.: A club moss that is common globally and suitable suitable enough for any small sized lycopsid from the Devonian to the present day. Lycopsids prefer areas where a large amount of water flows through but they will happily grow well in well draining soils.

Lycopodium: A club moss that is common globally and suitable suitable enough for any small sized lycopsid from the Devonian to the present day. Lycopsids prefer areas where a large amount of water flows through but they will happily grow well in well draining soils.

Cycad Series: A few specimens of conservatively stumpy little cycads. Suitable from the Permian to the modern day in forested or open environments with varying degrees of rainfall. If one were to add some little pseudoflowers to the trunk it could depict certain types of bennettitales, which were common in the Early Triassic to the early to mid-Cretaceous.


A moist Jurassic prairie showcasing many community plants and some fungi.

Hermanophyton Series: Based on a type of wood found in the Morrison Formation, the reconstruction can be suitable for a seed fern or bennettitale. A seed fern would prefer a more moisture-rich enviroment whilst bennettitales seem to have been present in both dry and wet environments. Suitable as a bennettitale from the Late Triassic till the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction, whilst a seed fern would be likely from the Carboniferous to the Early Cretaceous or the mid-Cretaceous in Australia. These plants can certainly be scaled up a fair bit to represent 5-6m tall specimens.

Ganoderma Mushroom: Carries the form of a woodland/field mushroom. In seasonal environments, mushrooms will spread their spores shortly after rain.


Some bromeliades proxying as bennettitalean pseudoflowers.

Nilssonia primitiva: Also referred to as Bjuvia primitiva, and comes from lower (=older) layers than Bjuvia dolomitica. Comes from the Southern Alps. It grew in the arid interior of volcanic islands during the start of the Middle Triassic. The climate was hot and seasonal. The family of Bjuvia seems to have largely evolved into more derived forms by the later period of the mid-Triassic. Although it is possible as is often the case it is possible some relict populations may have survived till later on.

Bjuvia dolomitica: A primitive cycad from the Southern Alps. It grew in the arid interior of volcanic islands during the start of the Middle Triassic. The climate was hot and seasonal.

Foliage? Idk - Assorted cycadophytes: Assorted cycads and/or Bennettitales. Some of these models are suitable for Triassic to Late Jurassic and Early Cretaceous habitats, others are a bit more speculative.

Zingiberopsis: An extinct member of the order Zingiberales (although the fossils may have been re-assigned). Zingiberales include mdern plants such as gingers, cannas, heliconias and bananas and had likely reached a global distribution by the early or middle Campanian.

Bjuvia simplex: A primitive cycad from the Southern Alps. It grew in the arid interior of volcanic islands during the start of the Middle Triassic.

Nilssoniocladus: A cycad or bennettite relative typical of those found in the Jurassic but also found in some sites in North America during the Maastrichtian — the latest period of the Cretaceous. A suitable model for habitats across both periods.

Calamitina Series: A genus of giant horsetails from the Carboniferous and early Permian which could grow between 30-50m tall. So these models are suitable for immature plants.

Tall Juniper: Junipers seem to have diverged from the rest of the cypress family as late as 50 million years ago, so they are suitable for dryland, mountain and temperate areas in the northern hemisphere from the eocene onwards. This model is suitable for an arid adapted juniper.

Tree Fern: The model is suitable to represent tree ferns from the Carboniferous — when they evolved — to the modern day.

Bennettitale bush: Suitable for low growing forms or saplings. Bennettitales thrived through most of the Mesozoic and there is evidence for them perhaps being around at the end of the Permian.


Cycas armstrongii: A few specimens of proportionally slender and tall little cycads. Suitable from the Permian to the modern day in forested or open environments with varying degrees of rainfall. It is similar in form to the Microcycas of Cuba, which lives in a much higher rainfall area, and Leptocycas of the Chinle formation of the Late Triassic. The Chinle Formation shares quite a similar monsoonal environment and temperature range to the seasonal plains that Cycas armstrongii now lives in so it is a case of convergent evolution. To me it would mean that cycads of this form are suitable for warm and humid/semi arid monsoonal environments both of open and more closed forest.

Tempskya: A strange tree fern that sprouted leaves in clusters from its trunk rather than from a single point at its top. Present globally from the Early to (earlier) Late Cretaceous. Some dinosaurs with which to pair this plant are Acrocanthosaurus, Iguanodon and Muttaburrasaurus.

Bennettites (arborescent): A member of the family Williamsoniaceae which grow as a tall and branching form. Some species grew as small shrubs whilst others may have grown as small and medium sized trees, commonly found from the Early Triassic to the Early to mid-Cretaceous, although it is still present in the Late cretaceous globally it is nowhere near as common in the landscape. Pseudoflowers can be added and growing heads seem to have split at sites where pseudoflowers and pods had grown, so they should be placed in the forks between branches or at the tips of them. Relict populations may have survived in Tasmania until the Oligocene.

Lycopsids: A lycopodium clubmoss, suitable for areas which experience regular rain, from the Devonian till the modern day from tropical to boreal environments (where they grow seasonally), although they can survive periods without water.

Neocalamites: Commonly found on watersides and in coastal areas from the start of the Permian till the early Jurassic.

Caytonia/Sagenopteris: Names for respectively the fertile structure and the leaves of a Jurassic seed fern, which may have been close to angiosperms. Reconstructed as a small tree.

Lycopod: A lycophyte, or clubmoss, lycophytes have been around since the Devonian and are among some of the first vascular plants. Lycophytes are generally not dessication resistant and prefer humid areas, but will grow in exsposed sites where water requirements are met.

Devonian plant: Either Zosterophyllum or a related plant. These are categorised as being early vascular plants. It is suitable for Silurian to Late Devonian displays, and perhaps in the margins of Carboniferous displays as well.

Prototaxites: A large fungus from the late Silurian to late Devonian period. Prototaxites and other early fungi, lichens and primitive mosses were responsible for turning rock and sand into soil.

Roided Cycad Grove: A cycad grove typical of older cycad growth.

Young Wollemi pine series: A tree with its origins in the Early Jurassic, the Wollemi pine is a member of the Araucariaceae. Wollemi pines have survived in a relict grove in a gully in Australia. They hail from more humid earlier days, and relatives would have been found across Gondwana in the Cretaceous.

Neocalamites: A large species of horsetail from the Triassic and Early Jurassic. there is evidence of species growing along rivers, lakes and near the brackish waters of estuaries.

New Zealand Kauri Pine: Agathis is a genus known from plant fossils in the Paleocene — after the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs — but it has a pollen record tracing back to the Middle Jurassic. One issue with identifying these trees by leaf fossils is that it has been determined that the leaves (called Podozamites on their own) are identical to one living genus of podocarp (namely Nageia) and an extinct Voltziale conifer (namely Krassilovia), so this leaf form was common to multiple conifers and cones must be found in association with it to confirm it as Agathis. The genus reached a global distribution during the Eocene, but then its range declined.

Wielandiella angustifolia: A bennettite from the Late Triassic of Greenland and Sweden, this plant is viewed as typical of its clade and is thought to have had a global distribution through the Jurassic.

Baiera: A leaf taxon assigned to the ginkgoale family. Reconstructed here as a small to medium tree, similar to the modern Ginkgo biloba.

Nilssoniocladus yukonensis: This plant grew in sandy areas and along the western coastline of North America's latest Cretaceous inland sea. Though it has traditionally been seen as a cycad with a growth style that is unfamiliar to us nowadays, its affinity remains a bit mysterious. Certain other species of the genus looked similar though some had serrated leaves, and it's thought that some grew as vines too.

Metasequoia: A deciduous water-loving tree, common in the non-tropical northern hemisphere during the Late Cretaceous through to the Eocene. As (if not more) suited for many Late Cretaceous North American dinosaurs' formations as the coast redwood.

Araucaria Pack: Looks most like Araucaria angustifolia. Fossils of similar Araucaria conifers date back to the Middle Jurassic, with similar leaf fossils being present in Late Cretaceous North America. The tree thrives today in a subtropical to warm temperate climate.

Ancient Species of Giant Cypress Basal cypresses like Cunninghamia lanceolata were present by the late Middle Jurassic, so these models are suitable from that point 'till the modern day.

Desert Decoration Series (a variety of cacti): Specifically depicts arid-adapted cacti from North, Middle and South America. Cacti seem to have evolved in the Late Eocene or Oligocene, so suitable for Cenozoic animals.

Araucaria angustifolia: Araucaria angustifolia is a modern Aracaurian conifer from South America. It's quite appropriate for most forested and wooded areas from the Late Triassic onwards. The small specimen can be used for more primitive conifers or to stand in for other members of Araucaria or convergent members of Podocarpaceae. In particular, its leaf morphology appears to be similar to that of the Araucaria leaf fossils from the Hell Creek Formation of the Late Maastrichian, and possibly other North American formations of its time.


Araucaria angustifolia playing the role of the Javelina Araucaria (which is mainly known from logs and timber). The Argentinosaurus is standing in for Alamosaurus.

Araucaria muelleri: A conifer from New Caledonia which grows in scrubby areas of moderate rainfall, poor soil quality and high drainage. The area is subject to fires. The model is suitable for early conifers, such as some kinds of walchian conifers, particularly if they are growing in a similar environment. The plant also shares its environment with a few species of podocarps, such as Dacrydium araucarioides, that have extremely similar growth and forms, albeit generally growing as small shrubs. It is not unreasonable for a similar growth habit appearing in other araucarian and podocarp conifers growing in similar conditions, as podocarps and aracuarian conifers are closely related.

Tiny Microcycas: A few specimens of proportionally slender and little cycads. Suitable from the Permian to the modern day in forested or open environments with varying degrees of rainfall. It is similar in form to the Microcycas of Cuba, which lives in a much higher rainfall area, and the Leptocycas of the Chinle formation of the Late Triassic. The Chinle Formation shares quite a similar monsoonal environment and temperature range to the seasonal plains that Cycas armstrongii now lives in so it is a case of convergent evolution. To me it would mean that cycads of this form are suitable for warm and humid/semi arid monsoonal environments both of open and more closed forest.

Tall cycads: A better representative of Leptocycas, Microcycas and Cycas armstrongii using the date palm.

Gleichenia Fern Series: A family of ferns that evolved in the Carboniferous and are present today in Africa, Oceania and Southeast Asia. The plant grows in disturbed areas, open areas and forest edges and will grow in sprawling thickets and will ramble up trees.


Gleichenia ferns ramble up trees on the forest edge to create a wall of vegetation in the Chinle River pen.

Weichselia reticulata Series: Described from both the Los Hoyas wetlands in Spain and the mid-Cretaceous river deltas of North Africa, sources suggest that they were perhaps two different species, with two different habits. The Spanish specimens have indications of charring from seasonal fires, are not very commonly found and are suspected to have been growing in the seasonal savannah inland from the wetlands, whilst the dominant vegetation in the wetland was a type of cheirolepid conifer shrub. The North African specimens of Weichselia reticulata have been recovered with intact mangrove-style supporting roots and have been found in relative abundance so it's quite likely that these were the dominant plants of the estuary communities.

Bisonia niemii Series: A broad leafed laurel from the Hell creek formation. The plant seems to be rather common in the formation. Models represent the plant as a tree, or a stand of trees with sapplings growing nearby. Although as breadfruit trees (atrocarpus)are known from the dinosaur park formation of the earlier Campainian in more northernly regions I do not think that it would be unreasonable to suspect this leaf maybe referable to that genus.

Spinifex series: A xertic grass that evolved in Australia likely in the Oligocene, spinifex prefers impoverished soils and arid areas, although it can be found in seasonally dry enviroments where conditons are tough and competition is not particularly forthcoming.

Podocarpus drouynianus: The emu bush, a fruiting conifer shrub that grows in humid and damp coastal forests in South West Western Australia. It has a very similar but more drought hardy relative, the dwarf plum pine, which grows in well draining sites in more exposed locations. Podocarps had diverged by the start of the Jurassic and fill many niches today, plants in the same genus are often trees, shrubs or even ground covers.

Calamus vine: A climbing palm vine which climbs by grappling the surrounding plants with barbed tendrils. The stems, leaves and tendrils which sometimes form curtains are covered in barbed spikes and long thorns, which can form impenetrable thickets in clearings or on forest margins. Calamus was present by the end of the Campanian.

Bull Kauri Series Agathis is a genus known from plant fossils in the Paleocene — after the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs — but it has a pollen record tracing back to the Middle Jurassic. One issue with identifying these trees by leaf fossils is that it has been determined that the leaves are identical to one living genus of podocarp (namely Nageia) and an extinct Voltziale conifer (namely Krassilovia), so cones must be found in association with leaf fossils. Agathis reached a global distribution during the Eocene, but then its range declined.

Cook Pine Series: A conifer native to New Caledonia, it is closely related to the Norfolk pine (which figures as Norfolk Island and New Caledonia both make up continental islands as part of the submerged landmass Zealandia) Differences between the species are likely due to regular dispersion and isolation because of the rise in sea levels. Leaves similar to this tree have been found in marine sediments in the Mackunda formation of mid-Cretaceous Queensland.

Podocarpus Series: Model is based on the New Zealand Dacrydium and Dacrycarpus genera which form the emergent growth in the cold Gondwanan forests of New Zealand. These trees seem to have been present in the Otway basin during the mid-Cretaceous in Australia.

Ginkgo series: Leaf morphology is all wrong but I wanted to make something to slap in as a proxy with both yellow autumn/dry season leaves and green ones. Ginkgoes first appeared as trees in the Triassic, and thrived until the mid-Cretaceus globally. They would be commonly found in the fossil record in the Northern hemisphere until the later Eocene, but are not common in the Southern hemisphere after the K-Pg mass extinction.

So this is the part where we attempt to describe the formations in question, and any others that these animals are found in to aid in any reconstruction effort.

When reading this part of the guide, you may be struck with how similar the flora often is across formations, and across decent stretches of time as well. There's a couple reasons for that.
Firstly, the fossil record very often gives us a picture of the same ecosystems. Lakes, floodplains and swamps are just where plants and animals are most likely to fossilise. We only rarely get glimpses into what plants grew in jungles or on mountains, for example.

Second, during the Mesozoic, the world was more tightly connected since the continents hadn't drifted apart as much. Combined with the fact that it was generally warmer so there were fewer distinct latitudinal bands of temperature zones, it means that any given plant genus probably had a larger range than what we are used to today.

Lastly, we're mostly talking about ferns and gymnosperms dominating in these environments. Flowering plants, though they evolved somewhere in the Triassic or Jurassic, only became a prominent feature of these ecosystems in the Early Cretaceous. Nonflowering plants rely on wind to spread their spores or pollen more often than flowering plants do, and that means their gene pools are very "wide": a plant can effectively exchange genetic info with conspecifics from much further away. Large interbreeding populations like this diverge into more species less easily, since a larger gene pool is less likely to get pushed decisively into a single direction (be it due to genetic drift or due to the evolutionary pressures imposed by a specific, spatially confined environment. There's also other factors like coevolution with insects, small genome sizes etc. which allow flowering plants to speciate faster.

But anyway, let's get into it.


Monsoon season in the Chinle Formation.

Chinle Formation (USA)
A coastal area in the influence of a monsoonal cycle which was becoming drier as a rain shadow effect increased. Droughts and fire are present in this area, although violent floods also occasioned. Dunes are present along with permanent and seasonal ponds and wetlands. The predominant kinds of trees seem to be basal araucarian conifers and cheirolepid conifers, with the occasional ginkgo relative. 3m+ tall Neocalamites horsetails would have been present along permanent water ways along with the mysterious plants Sanmiguelia and Pelourdea. Ferns were diverse and included both classical forms as well as stranger ones like Dipteridaceae and Matoniaceae. Tree ferns can be used.
Away from permanent water, drought hardy plants would have endured. Ferns and clubmosses may have died off during the dry season and only thrown out new shoots with the coming of the rains. Cycads, bennettites and hardy conifers would have been present in the dry scrublands. Soils were red and iron rich. As the area was coastal, the river bed is mainly mud and sand.
Coelophysis bauri

Upper Elliot Formation(Lesotho)
A dry and drought prone area with dunes present and seasonal streams. Drought hardy cycads, conifers and bennettitales were likely present although the only plant fossils we have are root fossils.
Coelophysis rhodesiensis

Löwenstein formation
Before the Trossingen Formation, in the same spot there was the Löwenstein. This formation was deposited by a river delta advancing through a playa, a usually dry plain. The area was pretty dry either seasonally or on occasion, and sweeping wildfires would leave the sandy landscape vulnerable to rapid erosion. The area was dominated by Cheirolepidiaceae, which were adapted to dry or salty conditions, as well as seed ferns like corystosperms. There were also ferns and cycads.
Plateosaurus gracilis

Trossingen Formation (Germany)
An estuary area dominated by conifers, including cheirolepids, a possible araucarian, and a members of the more basal voltzian family, along with a smooth leafed cycad, lycopods, bennettites and Czekanowskia.
Plateosaurus trossingensis


Plateosaurus in the dry Trossengen scrubland on the edge of a gallery forest.



Kayenta Formation (USA)
Formerly a monsoonal area but increasing in aridity, desert encroachment and dune encroachment. Vegetation preserved in the formation includes araucarians, pine relatives (Pinaceae), gleichenian ferns(also known as coral ferns), horsetails and a species of bennettite, although cycads and drought hardy cheirolepid conifers may have been present along with early ephedras. The area was still seasonal so away from sources of water plants would have probably been lower and more scrubbier. Sands and soils seem to have been high in iron and usually an orange or reddy brown.
Dilophosaurus
Scelidosaurus

Charmouth Mudstone Formation (UK)
Unfortunately, Scelidosaurus was found washed out to sea so we do not have great information about specifically the island it was inhabiting, but we do have a pretty good floral record from the roughly contemporary Drzewica Formation from Poland, which seems to represent a brackish mangrove-like community. The formation also preserves trackways that may have been made by a Scelidosaurus. The climate would have been tropical and warm with seemingly a high amount of rainfall. There does not seem to have been regular fires. Cheirolepid conifers and Caytoniales seem to have been the bigger trees within the seaside communities, but with a much larger amount of bennettites and cycads preserved, and a wide diversity of ground, tree and epiphytic (growing on other plants) ferns. There were also 3m tall Neocalamites horsetails. In less brackish areas, swamp communities of primitive broad leaved Krassilovia conifers may have been present as well as ginkgos and podocarps, araucarian conifers, cycads, ferns and clubmosses. Feel free to throw in some coastal dunes with some low and tough vegetation growing on them. Sediments seem to be thick dark estuary mud and yellow sands.
Scelidosaurus

On an interesting side note, the Kayenta and Drzewica Formations have trace fossils of possible coelophysids, and the Drzewica formation may have a possible dilophosaurid, whilst the Kayenta formation has trace fossils and osteoderms from a basal thyreophoran – a possible scelidosaurid. Both families of theropod have fossilised remains of relatives from across the globe during the early Jurassic.

Ornatenton Formation (Germany):
The sandy seashore of an island in the Tethys sea, the climate is warm and likely dry and seasonal, the islands would be home to Araucaria, other conifers, cycads and bennettitales.
Torvosaurus sp.

Morrison Formation (USA) :
One of my favorite quotes of all time in regards to ecology is that diversity of environment breeds diversity of life. I find the Morrison formation fascinating as it seems to fit this saying so well.
Essentially the Morrison was a vast baking hot basin, bordered from the North by a retreating seaway, to the west by the volcanic Front Range; a mountain range which absorbs much of the rain destined to the Morrison Basin. To the north, the region near the coast is more forested and humid supporting forests of huge conifers, and peatlands, and to the south it becomes much more arid. At the southern end of the Morrison Formation, in New Mexico there seems to have been cheirolepid scrub (an extinct family of conifers that helpfully are very convergent to cypresses in form, but handle fire much better) and desert. There is a trend towards more aridification through time. There’s dune fields present in the Morrison and even seemingly some salt lakes. Forests of conifers, Caytoniales (a group of primitive seed producing trees and shrubs), ferns, bennettitales, cycads, tree ferns, clubmosses and ginkgos are supported by the rivers that flow across the Morrison flood plain or underneath it; ground water supplies wetlands and swamps, oasis on the dry and unforgiving flood plain. During the short rainy season, or in the wake of floods from the highlands the floodplains are covered for a short time in verdant swathes of ferns, cycads and clubmosses. Fires on the flood plain seem limited in scope and reasonably rare. Little charcoal is known from the formation.
The Morrison is a patchwork of baking semi-arid flood plain, dense forest, open woodlands and both temporary and permanent wetlands. The Morrison has several main types of sedimentology. River channels were sandy, so not particularly fast flowing. The flood plain is iron rich red clay, whilst the bottoms of ponds and lakes were lime rich mudstones.

Apatosaurus
Brachiosaurus
Brontosaurus
Camarasaurus
Dryosaurus
Torvosaurus tanneri

Sauropods and ornithopods forage in peatland and forest sustained by ground water on the edge of encroaching dunes in the Morrison Formation.

Lourinhã Formation (Portugal):
A warm and dry coastal area that experiences a distinct wet season. It is a slightly damper and fairly cooler environment than the contemporary Morrison formation of North America but with a largely comparable plant record. Clays and sands seem to have been a yellowish colour.
Torvosaurus gurneyi

A lone Torvosaurus gurneyi in a Lourinhã Formation fern prarie. The foliage still green from recent rains.

Tendaguru Formation (Tanzania):
A warm and dry coastal area that experiences a distinct wet season, it is a slightly damper and fairly cooler environment than the contemporary Morrison formation of North America but with a largely comparable plant record.
Torvosaurus sp.

Tacuarembó Formation (Uruguay):
An area of sand dunes and seasonal streams. It seems to have likely been quite arid.
Torvosaurus sp.

Altmühltal Formation (also known as Solnhofen Limestone, Germany):
A hot and seasonal island, with low drought hardy vegetation, such as cycads, Bennettitales, pines, cheirolepid conifers and perhaps araucarian conifers. The island is bordered by reefs and an extremely saline lagoon (which helped preserve such detailed fossils). Sediments seem to have been a yellowish colour.
Archaeopteryx

Berriasian - Aptian

Wessex Formation(UK):
A wide seasonal flood plain surrounding a meandering river that sees regular fires. As the river shifted and flooded each season, it left oxbow lakes and back swamps, proving habitat for many fish and aquatic reptiles. Rainfall is high but evaporation is high too. The first flowering trees are starting to emerge and magnolias start to join the conifer dominated forests along water courses, and lily pads would have been present in the water. The fire-effected upland and flood plain areas are dominated by pines (in fact, one of the earliest known pine species comes from the Wealden), cheirolepid conifers, cycads and likely bracken-like ferns. Fire hardy and drought tolerant tree ferns are known from Spain at this time, and may have been present in the Wessex formation. Sediments seem to have been light grey and purple-brown clays and clay mudstones.
Iguanodon

Sainte-Barbe Clays Formation(Belgium, Netherlands):
The final resting place of the many well-preserved Iguanodon of Bernissart. Part of the Wealden Group just like the Wessex formation. A seasonally dry swampy environment where braided river channels and oxbow lakes were carved into an alluvial plain. Sinkholes formed thanks to the dissolution of deeper, Carboniferous depositions. Soils were clay-rich and brown to black with organic matter.
The environment appears to have stayed quite open due to frequent fire disturbance – as evidenced by charcoal – so conifers, cycads and bennettites were fairly rare. The ever-present Weichselia reticulata was found in abundance. Other ferns included Gleichenites and Phlebopteris. Angiosperms were rare or not present.
Iguanodon

Jiufotang Formation(China):
A moist and cold coastal conifer forest dominated by cypresses and ginkgos. there is evidence for vast freshwater and brackish swamplands dominated by primitive broad leaved Krassilovia conifers, lilly pads are present, horsetails and ephedras were common. There is evidence for low flowering plants. Sediments seem to indicate peat, mud and sands.
Microraptor
Psittacosaurus mongoliensis

Elrhaz Formation(the country Steam unfortunately censors as a racist term, refer to Ouranosaurus's Species name.):
An inland floodplain with wide, high energy (so not slow and meandering) rivers which has evidence of migrating sand dunes. The climate would have been very hot, as it was in one of the hottest periods in the Cretaceous and it was located on the equator at the time. The rivers were extremely productive although it would seem that they were not particularly deep. The surrounding area away from the rivers is interpreted to have been seasonally dry, perhaps monsoonal, but I have not found good information on this. I'd not take the presence of sand dunes as evidence of arid conditions by themselves. I could not find any good sources for vegetation, so based on the the Crato formation of South America and the later Kem Kem beds and Bahariya formations, humid forested areas would have likely had araucarian conifers such as kauris and wollemi pines. Flowering trees would have been present along with ginkgoes, podocarps, treeferns, cycads, bennettites, and older, more primitive conifers like Krassilovia may have lined the riversides. In seasonally dryer areas cycads, and more drought hardy conifers. In a monsoonal or seasonal environment, Araucaria similar to modern hoop pines(which can grow very tall) may have been the largest trees alongside shorter cheirolepid conifers, possibly drought hardy podocarps (similar in morphology and growth form to those found in the modern New Caledonian Marquis), Bennettitales, and cycads alongside seasonal plants such as flowering ground plants, flowering shrubs and ferns.
Ouranosaurus nigeriensis

Yixian Formation(China):
A cold highland area which may have experienced occasional snowfall, the formation preserves a lakeside environment in an volcanicly active area. A wealth of Bennettitales and Cycadales fossils have been found from this location. The cycads seem to grow in a almost brambly twisting manner (a style of growth called divaricating), and may have formed some dense thickets. The forests were dominated by cypresses, sequoias and ginkgos but there is also evidence for low, small flowering plants in the understory. Eventually covered over by light grey volcanic ash.
Psittacosaurus sp.

Dushihin Formation(Mongolia):
It was a lake. Sorry folks, literally could not find anything else at all about this, though some context clues can be taken from it's position. It seems an arid environment, although the lakeside would have provided habitiat for thicker vegetation. The climate would have been arid but cold, possibly given to occasional freezing conditions. Plane trees (sycamores), cypresses and ginkgoes may have been present on the lakeside whilst the desert would have probably been inhabited by ephedras, Cheirolepidaceae and possibly arid-adapted cypresses.
Psittacosaurus mongoliensis

Ilek Formation (Early OR middle Cretaceous)(Siberia):
A moist and cold coastal conifer forest dominated by cypresses, sequoias , ginkgos, sycamores (plane trees, so some big gnarly angiosperms) and small to medium sized angiosperms. There is evidence for vast freshwater and brackish swampland dominated by primitive broad leaved Krassilovia conifers, lily pads are present, horsetails and ephedras were common. There is evidence for small flowering plants.
Psittacosaurus sibiricus

[note: geologically speaking, the Cretaceous doesn't have a middle epoch, but when we say middle Cretaceous, y'all know what we mean.]

Aptian

Cloverly Formation(USA):
A large area (the Cloverly formation is not as exposed as some others, so the areas from which it can be accessed are widely scattered and not as easily researched) including sequoia forests, deserts and scrubland dominated by hardy conifers, cycads and ferns as it had been in the Jurassic, but in the gallery forests there are flowering and fruiting vines, sycamores, magnolias and a growing diversity of other flowering plants. By this time flowering and fruiting vines were achieving a global distribution, and the first palms were evolving. Soils seem to have varied from orange to maroon clays.
Acrocanthosaurus

Acrocanthosaurus plodding through a braided river, an Aquilops-eye view.

Twin Peaks(USA):
A warm and wet area around a coastal delta.
Acrocanthosaurus

Antlers Formation(USA):
A warm and wet area around a coastal delta.
Acrocanthosaurus

Mills Canyon trackway(USA):
Slightly later than the Cloverly formation, this area represents the freshwater inflow into a large saline lake. This area was likely the only permanent water on a seasonal semi arid savanna and would have supported a very large amount of different aquatic plants. I added this one as it suits the high water requirements, and lower vegetation requirement of Acrocanthosaurus.
Acrocanthosaurus

Aptian-Albian

Eumeralla Formation(Australia)
The flood plain of a large rift valley between southern mainland Australia, Tasmania and Antarctica. Well within the antarctic circle, this place would have experienced prolonged winter nights and large amounts of rainfall. The forests would have been dominated by Araucaria and Podozamites (a broad-leaved araucarian similar to moderns kauris) as well as large podocarps such as Dacrydium and Dacrycarpus – genera that currently dominate the canopies of the forests in New Zealand. Trees were likely decently spaced apart because of their reliance on low-angled light. Cycads and ginkgos were present, alongside small, basal flowering shrubs similar to the modern genus Ascarina. Bennettites and seed ferns were a more rare component of the flora. In estuary areas, pollen indicates the presence of cheirolepid conifers. Ferns such as Gleichenia and Osmunda were present, and lycophytes were very common.
Leaellynasaura

A flock of Leaellynasaura come to drink during a short spring night, just outside the floodplain.

Mackunda Formation(Australia):
A large and wide coastal plain left by a retreating seaway. The area was subtropical/warm temperate and had very high rainfall, although it was given to droughts at times. Horsetails were present armound the water ways. Fern prairies covered the flood plains. In areas where the river bank had burst and floodwaters had left behind swathes of sand, homogeneous groves of podocarps grew with no competition for the impoverished soil. The forests were made up of sequoias, ginkgos, todites, seed ferns (the later Winton formation is the last instance of seed ferns in the mesozoic record I can confirm) and early laurels were evolving. It's likely tree ferns, cycads, bennettites, Arauracariaceae and podocarps also made up the forest communities. There is a very well preserved Norfolk/Cook pine style araucarian conifer leaf from a marine deposit which is roughly contemporary with the Mackunda Formation, so a relative of these trees may have been present.
Muttaburrasaurus

Muttaburrasaurus on the edge of the forest.

Cenomanian-Turonian

Kem Kem beds and Bahariya Formation, (Morocco and Egypt); Echkar Formation (the country between Mali and Chad which Steam censors):
All of these formations are roughly contemporary (Echkar being slightly earlier). North Africa in the Cenomanian was near the equator, and was very hot and largely arid with yearly average temperatures between 28-35 °C. The sea level was high and the continent was largely flat, making the groundwater level high, the rivers wide, slow and snaking and also causing brackish and saltwater areas to encroach further inland. It would seem that relatively moist highland areas far inland fed the groundwater at the time.

Algeria preserves a salt marsh on the edge of a vast dune desert, whilst the marine environment consisted of stomatalite, sponge and shelf coral reefs. Tunisia and Libya preserve desert coastlines dotted with mangrove communities, stomatolites, sponge and coral reefs. These areas seem to have had a much lower marine nutrient load.
The Kem Kem beds and Bahariya represent the mouths of two major river systems, and preserve freshwater systems, including lakes and ponds, flowing into a large mangrove-dominated estuary and then into shallow inshore and lagoon environments. Take care that by mangroves, we don't mean the modern stilted angiosperm trees (those evolved later) but simply a flora adapted to inundation with salt water. The inshore marine environment largely consisted of mudflats, sand bars and bivalve (animals like clams and oysters, but specifically the extinct rudists in this case) reefs, which is expected for a warm marine area of high nutrient production. Algae blooms seemed to have been relatively common with the upper layers of the formation showing evidence for red tides.

The mangrove communities were dominated by the tree fern Weichselia reticulata, and likely also featured salt-hardy ferns and horsetails as lower growth. The cheirolepid shrub Frenelopsis is known from the estuary environment. Relatives to the modern Hibiscus and Terminalia seem to have been present: these plants tend to grow in coastal conditions in the modern day and are salt tolerant (although they don't take well to immersion). Freshwater marshes and swamps may have hosted a species of Krassilovia (or similar swamp conifers) and hosted lily pads, lotus, horsetails and ferns. In the gallery forests, a large diversity of flowering trees and shrubs such as magnolias, laurels, figs and poplars along with a large variety of flowering vines, tree ferns, ginkgos and podocarps grew under a canopy largely consisting of kauris.
Plant fossils from the desert areas are seemingly unknown although I would imagine that there would have been some kinds of plants, perhaps drought hardy conifers, such as cheirolepids, Gnetales and cycad-like plants.
Carcharodontosaurus
Spinosaurus

The channel of a North African estuary during the Cenomanian.

Huincul Formation(Argentina):
A dry to semi humid region which was cool but dry, with rivers that flow through it all year round. Alongside the rivers grow humid forests of araucarian conifers, particularly Wollemi pines. Podocarps grow alongside beeches and laurels, swamps and lagoons are common interspersed with sand dunes. Away from the water ways, it is dry and seasonally arid, becoming more humid over time and the rivers will become seasonally flowing.There’s large areas dominated by sand dunes. Ephedras are present in this desert environment as are a range of scrubby cheirolepid conifers and maybe Welwitschia plants. Sediment is a dark red brown colour.
Argentinosaurus

Dinosaur Park Formation:
A heavily forested warm temperate environment with very high rainfall. Angiosperms like sycamores and breadfruit (which is a tropical plant in the modern day) as well as ginkgos grow along the rivers. Low flowering plants are common; tree ferns and king ferns are present. Although the forest is dominated by conifers including pines, podocarps and cypresses, there are no araucarians present. Along the banks of the rivers and lakes, there were reeds and horsetails and in the water, lillypads and Marsilea ferns grew.
Lambeosaurus
Parasaurolophus walkeri
Styracosaurus

Oldman Formation:
A warm temperate area that seems to have been in a rain shadow. The floodplain is subject to fires and is a dry savannah-type environment. By the rivers that run through the area, angiosperms related to walnuts and figs grow.
Styracosaurus
Parasaurolophus walkeri

Styracosaurus and Parasaurolophus on the dry flood plain of the Oldman formation.

Fruitland Formation:
An area of rivers and swamps, with open forests dominated by sequoia trees accompanied by an understory of figs, magnolias and other flowering plants. The climate was tropical and moist.
Parasaurolophus cyrtocristatus

Kirtland Formation:
An area of rivers and swamps, with open forests dominated by sequoia trees accompanied by an understory of figs, magnolias and other flowering plants. The climate was tropical and moist.
Parasaurolophus tubicen

Kaiparowits Formation:
A warm tropical rainforest with high rainfall. The forest is dominated by large and gnarly cypresses and ginkgos. Along the waterways is the old guard of sycamores, magnolias and camellias. Aquilaria, a genus that is now common in Southeast Asia, is a common small tree. Palms have, at the start of the Campanian, exploded in diversity and fan palms, wait-a-while vine, and regular palms are all present. Many families of recognisable rainforest plants such as bananas, heliconias, gingers, elephant eared plants, monsteras and Cannabis are developing in these warm tropical conditions.
Nasutoceratops
Parasaurolophus cyrtocristatus


Wapiti Formation:
A riverine delta with multiple lakes in the area. The area consisted of vast expanses of marsh and cypress dominated wetlands. Ferns, horsetails and reeds would have flourished. The climate was temperate and moist.
Pachyrhinosaurus lakustai
Edmontosaurus regalis

Prince Creek Formation:
A cold temperate environment of extensive lakes, swamplands and open forests, subject to high precipitation and floods. It lay within the Arctic circle and saw months of darkness in the year. The average temperature of the coldest month here, less than ten degrees from the Campanian north pole, was around freezing. With fluctuations in mind, that means cold periods were never long and no permanent ice formed. Further inland, winters were less mild and ice could form.
Dominant trees were basal, often deciduous cypresses like Parataxodium, occasionally interspersed with ginkgos. Flowering plants were abundant in the understorey and in the water. Their leaves were often a bit smaller and with toothed margins, as is typical in colder environments.
The forest was open and low, similar to the most northerly taigas today.
Ugrunaaluk
Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum
A group of Ugrunaaluk and Pachyrhinosaurus in Prince Creek's long dark night of winter.

Djadochta Formation:
An arid desert environment with extensive dunes. Cheirolepid conifers may have made an important component of the plant communities alongside drought hardy ephedras. The sands seem to have been an orange brown.
Protoceratops
Velociraptor

Horseshoe Canyon Formation:
A wide “bird’s foot” delta similar to that of the Mississippi bay. Sediment has exited the mouth of the river and formed a mass of sandy bars and islands. The area consisted of vast expanses of marsh and cypress-dominated wetlands. Additional trees include Sequoia relatives, pine relatives and Cunninghamia. Ferns, horsetails and reeds would have flourished. The climate was temperate and moist.
Pachyrhinosaurus canadensis
Edmontosaurus regalis

Nemegt Formation:
A vast inland delta similar to the modern Okavango delta, situated in a reasonably dry, semi-arid (but becoming moister over time) environment. It doesn't really preserve plants but through adjacent formations in space and time, we know that forests would have consisted of angiosperms like plane trees, ginkgos, cypresses and araucarian conifers. The wetland would have consisted of marshes dominated by reeds, horsetails and floating flowering plants & ferns.
Deinocheirus
Tarbosaurus

Ojo Alamo formation:
(this is mainly based on the nearby Javelina Formation) A semi arid savannah plain with gallery forests consisting of basal Malvales (relatives to modern kapoks which had a similar growth habit) but dominated by araucarian conifers, and fan palms were common. On the plain itself pines, cycads and seasonal plants would have been present.
Tyrannosaurus

Lance Formation:
A subtropical forested region similar to Hell Creek, which existed at the same time. Just like that more famous formation, it was a wet coastal plain bordering the retreating Western Interior Seaway. Angiosperms dominate: there's forests of trees in the beech order (Fagales), gunneras, sabal palms, relatives of mistletoes in the Santalales, lily relatives etc. Among nonflowering plants, there's an abundance of ferns (including tree ferns), there's mosses, lycophytes, Sequoia, Cryptomeria, Taxodium, and cycads.
Edmontosaurus
Triceratops horridus
Tyrannosaurus

Yuliangze Formation:
A warm and humid lake, river and floodplain system. Near the water, cypresses like Taxodium, Glyptostrobus and Metasequoia dominated alongside Ginkgo species similar to our modern one. Forests were made up of podocarps as well as relatives of modern plane trees and Trochodendron. Angiosperms also made up important components of understory and aquatic communities.
Charonosaurus

Hell Creek Formation:
A warm and moist floodplain, centred around a meandering river. Swamps are present and they are dominated by swamp cypresses. Dawn redwood forests are present, as are forests of flowering plants and conifers. All kinds of palms are common. The flood plain seems to be fire effected, or at least influenced, with charcoal present. The most fire-prone areas are dominated by pines, bracken-like ferns, fan palms and cycads. Within the forests, flowering plants are very common. There’s leaf fossils, cones and nuts from an araucarian conifer present. whilst often depicted as being like the Chilean Monkey Puzzle these leaf fossils seem to be more similar to the Brazilian Candelabra pine (Araucaria angustifolia) or the New Guinean Klinky pine (A. hunsteinii).
Ankylosaurus
Edmontosaurus
Triceratops horridus/prorsus
Tyrannosaurus

A Triceratops prorsus at the swamp edge in Hell Creek.

Eocene
Shara Murun Formation:
A heavily forested subtropical region with abundant and year round water. Tropical plant species were present and common such as palms, cycads, figs, cypresses and ferns. Similar plant communities may still exist as relict forests in southern China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Juxia sharamurensis

A Pair of Juxia in a subtropical forest meadow.

Oligocene
Chitarwata Formation:
Okay, so the interpretation is a coastal environment within close proximity to the nearby Himalayas means that the Chitarwata formation preserves plants from a handful of different environments. The direct coastal area supported mangrove forest including mangrove trees, and coastal trees such as beach almonds (Terminalia), and tropical forest with palms back from the shore and likely away from water sources it has been suggested the landscape was largely an Ephedra-dominated dry steppe-like environment (likely kept clear by the constant browsing of the rich megafauna in this area), It would seem at this point that grasses were not a common part of the landscape, and they were yet to adapt to growing in sunny, dry locations. There were subtropical forests of oak, alder, hazels and birch on the nearby highlands of the Himalayas whilst pines,spruce and cedars lived higher up and their remains washed down in floods. Ferns, clubmosses (like Selaginella) and herbaceous flowering plants seem to have been quite common although it is unclear which environment these came from.
I'm going to break from the interpretation a little bit and offer an alternative interpretation here. I'll suggest that in the floral survey plants that had higher numbers of specimens were likely from the local area. In which case the coastal area may have hosted pine trees as these are trees that are still often found at low altitudes in subtropical and tropical areas. I'd suggest that perhaps the dry steppe area may have been a low shrubland dotted with palms and that Amaranthaceae/Chenopodiaceae/Caryophylaceae (small herbaceous flowering plants), ferns and Selaginella, were all growing here along with the Ephedra shrubs. Although it is possible the palms could be mangrove palms, and the ferns were also part of the mangrove community.
I'd imagine that fauna from the coastal plain might seasonally visit the temperate uplands, and regularly forage within the mangrove wetlands as many modern animals do to this day. So a ton of choice here!
Paraceratherium bugtiense


My take on the Chitarwata formation based on the paper by Dario De Franceschi et al 2008.

Hsanda Gol Formation:
A mixture of semi-arid to arid scrubland, grassland and desert with dunes and evidence of dried up water sources. Predominant plants include oaks, elms and birches, albeit arid adapted species, alongside Ephedra scrubland.
Paraceratherium transouralicum

Late Miocene Formations
Liushu Formation:
A warm sub arid temperate grassland with woodland. Dryland grasses are present along with temperate broad leafed trees likely found around sources of water. Further from water similar species with more narrow leaves, better adapted to dry conditions would be present.
Sinotherium lagrelii

A pair of Sinotherium explore along an arroyo during the dry season.

Late Pleistocene Formations
La Brea Tar Pits Formation:
The climate of southern California seems not to have changed overly much since the Pleistocene. It has undergone damper and drier cycles but the vegetation is similar to what is natively found in southern California today. The area around where the tar pits are would have been primarily open saltbush and juniper shrubland with stands of conifers and hardwoods near the water courses. The nearby hills would have been covered with chaparral- essentially a thick and tangled scrubland community of drought and fire hardy short trees and shrubs that are often thorny.
Smilodon fatalis
Panthera atrox

A pair of American Lions encounter a Smilodon somewhere near La Brea


Luján Formation:
Several sites in the Luján river basin in Argentina. During the Pleistocene and Holocene the climate, much like around the rest of the world, varied greatly over time. During glacial maximums the basin became a cold dry pampas steppe with permanent wetlands and dry woodlands, and during the warmer interglacial periods the basin would become more subtropical, similar to the climate of southern Brazil. The current climate of the region is warm temperate.
Smilodon populator

Mammoth steppe (Tokod, Kökșetau Formations, Yamal Peninsula, Vilyuy River etc.)
The mammoth steppe stretched continuously from Western Europe, through Asia, into Alaska during the last glaciation. These lands were characterised by tundra plants, such as low willows, and a stunningly vast array of low seasonal flowers and dryland grasses. Over time the steppe became more moist and woody plants became more prominent, or perhaps extra pressure caused by overpredation (at a time of low CO2 in the atmosphere as well, leading to lower plant productivity) by humans caused the extinction of keystone species such as mammoths that kept conifer and tundric moss infringement upon the grasslands at bay.
Elasmotherium Sibiricum
Mammuthus primigenius
Coelodonta antiquitatis
Panthera spelaea
Megaloceros giganteus

Spring in Doggerland.

When talking about cold Mesozoic environments lately, the Maastrichtian Prince Creek Formation has somewhat become a poster child. There are also the Otway Basin of Southern Australia, the Yixian Formation of central China and the Ilek Formation of Siberia which all come from the Aptian and Albian (the last two ages of the Early Cretaceous).

So while the Mesozoic was once considered to be a wholly warm era, it's become clear that it had some colder intervals. The first seems to be at the end of the Triassic and in the early Jurassic, with evidence from China of stones being frozen and transported in sheets of ice that were on lakes.
Then, in the Early Cretaceous, there is evidence for a period of glaciations and cold snaps from the Valanginian till the Albian, with the Hauterivian likely being the coldest age of the entire Mesozoic. Evidence supporting this includes a glacier in northern central Spain (which would have been at a paleo-latitude of only around 45°) permafrost in a high altitude lake in China and a very large glacier in Southern Australia which would have emptied into the Eromanga sea. This glacier was present from the Valangian till the Aptian and was at a paleolatitude of around 60-70° as Australia migrated North and East and the glacier became closer to the pole.

The consequences of such evidence, particularly the evidence of glaciation in both the Northern and Southern hemisphere, in my eyes represent an interesting prospect. It would seem that there were cold snaps and cold cycles not unlike those of the Late Pleistocene, albeit where the glaciation was not as extensive and where warmer seas may have mitigated the effects near coastal areas.

But we are left with the prospect of permanent glaciation in some regions, even at or near sea level and not just at high altitudes, and subsequently communities of plants and animals which would have adapted to deal with these conditions, and which may have held on in cooler regions and at higher altittudes during warmer periods, to spread back into parts of their former range during cold periods. We could speculate that there would be communities analogous to modern boreal forest and in the far northern and southern reaches, or during particularly cold periods such as the Hauterivian, a mesozoic tundra.

I have some screenshots here exploring a speculation of the Northern coast of Canada, during the Aptian. An Acrocanthosaurus or relative lives on the cold, almost tundric coast. Whilst needle-bearing conifers are obviously quite well suited to freezing and dry conditions, there are still plenty of deciduous gymnosperms and spore bearing plants associated with sub-zero temperatures (or at least those which die back, shed leaves or take on autumn hues) such as the modern Ginkgo, larches, Osmunda and Matteuccia ferns and mosses. While in the modern day, cycads are restricted to the tropics and subtropics, we do have a deciduous cycad in the modern day (Cycas armstrongii, for drought reasons), and the same is thought for polar cycadophytes for reasons of light limitation. Specifically, Nilssonia is known to have had a northern polar range in the latter part of the Cretaceous.







Here in my example of a speculative Canadian coast during the Aptian age of the middle Cretaceous, I imagine the ground to be carpeted with mosses and lichen, much like in modern tundra. There's cold hardy dwarf prostrate ginkgoes, podocarps similar to modern Halocarpus and Microcachrys, as well as ephedras, perhaps mixed with a cold hardy species of Frenelopsis - a cheirolepid conifer. The largest trees are small, sparse stands of what appear to be stunted araucarian conifers, although they could also be cold, dry and impoverished soil-adapted podocarps, cheirolepids, or voltzian conifers.

So different soil types will promote different types of plants. This is often immediately apparent in semi-arid environments in my personal experience, but I am an Australian, so semi-arid environments are pretty much our jam.

Sandier and more impoverished soils will promote plants that require less water, like higher drainage or may take longer to mature. Sandier areas may be caused by a disturbance such as the bursting of a river's levee bank, which often washes tons of sand out over the riverside and floodplain (this is called a fluvial fan and it’s also a form of fossil preservation) and create pioneer communities. In the Aptian of Australia there is evidence for almost completely homogeneous groves of a species of Podocarpus (fruiting conifer) on disturbed sandy sites, and similar trees in the modern day do this in New Zealand. Podocarps do surprisingly well in sandy soils and are often found in coastal forests in tropical South Asia and Oceania today).

Black soil: This is a highly fertile and productive soil. It will form in patches and swathes in the landscape, on flood plains and in forests it will often collect into hollows and form perennial ponds. It absorbs water very well and holds a lot of water so that when it rains these are the patches of the landscape that green up first and brown last during dry weather. Often especially in semi-arid conditions there are species of plants that thrive in black soil but rarely grow elsewhere. When damp, these areas can become very boggy and will, in higher rainfall areas, become permanent bogs or marshes or seasonal marshes/meadows. Often, water loving species will grow in these low areas such as certain palm species such as the bungalow palm in Oceania.

Rocks: rocky environments can trap moisture or protect sensitive plants from fire.


The flood plain around the pond in the Jurassic Portugal paddock is a patchwork of more barren, sandy sediment on one hand and more fertile soils on the other, and vegetation cover reflects this.

Deciduousness: The losing of leaves from trees and plants at certain points of the year happens for three main reasons.

Firstly the reason most associated with deciduousness; cold conditions threaten the plant. There is evidence for some cold conditions at the poles during all ages of the Mesozoic, and previously during the Permian. The early Jurassic and the Aptian have evidence for cold conditions, since quite fortunately we have not just the Ilek formation of Siberia that spans the Aptian at the north pole, but we also have the Dinosaur Cove formation in Australia straddling the south pole contemporaneously. (We also have isotopes from this period from plesiosaurs from Greenland and Australia indicating that they were hunting under ice, for part of the year. Sorry to be an ape but HOW COOL IS THAT?)

Secondly the plant is in or near a polar region; It does not matter the climate, the prospect of facing several months of complete darkness, even in relatively warm and moist conditions, favours shedding leaves. No light = no photosynthesis = leaves are a bit of a waste of time for now, aren't they?



Thirdly; dry and hot, but seasonal conditions. Often, plants growing in areas of low seasonal rainfall will just lose their leaves for the dry season to conserve water, and throw out shoots with the first rains. This is particularly common in what is perversely known as 'dry rainforest', often you get different species of the same kinds of angiosperm trees as in wet rainforest and there is little reason to doubt that this may have been the case before angiosperms took over the world's forests. The most widespread cycad in the monsoon belt (Cycas armstrongii) of the Northern Territory of Australia loses its leaves over the dry season and will throw out new growth during the spring fires (generally caused by lightning hitting the tinder-dry grasslands in the build up for the monsoon).

Dry rainforest and tropical deciduous forest is something that has not really been explored in a Mesozoic context. I think prime candidates for this kind of environment would be ginkgos, (we have one surviving example of this entire family of plants so ecologies of extinct species are likely to have been much more varied, for instance we have a ginkgoale with a mangrove ecology from the mid-Cretaceous of Europe) arid adapted tree ferns, cycads and bennettites.

Fire: Fire is generally naturally caused by lightning, in seasonal or monsoonal areas especially with high rainfall this seems to usually happen at the very end of the dry season, when the land is tinder-dry and there is a lot of electrical activity as the clouds carrying the rains brew. We have a lot of fossilised charcoal from different deposits through time, and strangely, like in the case of the Morrison formation, a near complete lack of the stuff in an environment we know was hot, dry and seasonal.

Fire can have several effects on plant communities. In the modern day we can observe it removing competition from forests. In pine and Araucaria forests in North and South America (respectively) fire kills faster-growing angiosperms that would outcompete and replace the dominant conifers of their respective forests. So you end up with thickets of angiosperms where the fire has not reached, and elsewhere a conifer-dominated forest with lower understories of angiosperms that will burn away with the next blaze.

It can by this way promote and expand fire effected communites (plants that thrive after fire include pines, eucalypts, cycads, fan palms, grass, bracken etc.). These communities dry out readily and burn quickly. But some communities will resist fire; Araucaria bidwilli (the bunya pine) is a good example of a tree that does not only tolerate a scorching but will actually protect other plants around it and act to break up a fire as it is so difficult to burn, and we have fossils of direct relatives (so closer related to it than to any other surviving Araucaria) coming from around the mid-Jurassic. Areas like boulder fields and rocky ground , or dunes, even in well-vegetated areas can also stop or break up a fire and thus provide a refuge to fire sensitive plants.

In prehistoric deposits we can judge what plants made up the communities that had been burnt in a fire and preserved as charcoal. Typically in the Mesozoic (this is based off of the Wessex formation, Las Hoyas(both Barremian) and Hațeg Island(during the Albian and Maastrichtian)) these feature a diversity of ground ferns, Weichselia reticulata tree ferns (a weird marattian tree fern) and (with the exception of Las Hoyas) cycads and pines. Charred bennettitale reproductive structures (weird flower things but not really flowers) were found in the Wessex formation as well.

There is a likely explanation of the relative low amount of charcoal from before the Early Cretaceous and this may be that in the Mesozoic oxygen levels (mainly in the Triassic but also in the Jurassic and to a lesser extent the Cretaceous) were actually really quite low in comparison to the modern day. Fire needs oxygen to burn so it is entirely likely that fires during the earlier part of the Mesozoic were less vigorous than they are today. They might have been more prone to burn slower and smoulder rather than becoming raging infernos as we have seen in modern forest fires.


A fire-effected semi-arid savannah before dawn during the rainy season.

Cut and drop reforestation: Making up missing macro herbivores.
Cut and drop reforestation is seemingly a legitimate way of rehabilitating some forest areas in the modern day. The idea is that you prune leaf bearing branches from the local vegetation and drop it on the ground where it breaks down. It may seem drastic, but in certain contexts it makes sense. I believe that the basic concept that you're fulfilling the role of the missing large browsers of the environment, and the benefits of this method best highlight some advantages of large browsers.

With many plants pruning plants will invigorate root growth, this will mean the plant can reach deeper into the ground, and/or further along the substrate for water making it more able to bounce back from stresses such as drought, or overgrazing and obstinate herbivores. The roots break up the soil and allow water to infiltrate the soil, which benefits the local water table.

The dropped branches etc are carbon being introduced into the environment, they make snags and slow run off water. The extra carbon in the soil holds more moisture in the substrate which benefits ground covers, which in turn slows water run off, adds more carbon and helps protect the substrate from drying out by shielding it from direct sunlight. In the case of macro browsers (and grazers) this carbon is dung and any branches etc that are incendently or purposefully broken off, which has the added benefit of containing food for insects/microbes and fungi that will further feed and benefit the plants.

This method has been used to revitalise desertified areas, to me it is a good indicator of the types of positive effects that large browsers can have on their environment. How large browsers can enrich the environment, especially in the case of animals many times the size of a modern elephant such as paraceratherium, or especially in the case of the ever efficient sauropods.

Cyclones, seasonality and storms.
It's funny when you know a few things academically but haven't put the connections together in your mind till you suddenly see something. Araucarian conifers were widespread during the Paleocene and Eocene (mainly Agathis (kauris)), and the Mesozoic (Araucaria proper) having a widespread global distribution, so I have long wondered what the reason for their supremacy might have been during a time of globally warmer temperatures. I am fortunate to live in an area where we have lots of araucarian conifers. In my neighbourhood we have Norfolks, Cooks, 3 species of kauris, hoop and bunya pines. I have even encountered 2 much rarer Klinky pines from Papua New Guinea in my area (you have no idea how pleased I was when I identified them).
I was recently hit by the very edge of a small but rather early cyclone; cyclone season in Eastern Australia comes from the start of November till April. Although they can form in November, it is usually accepted that they usually form from the end of December till the end of March (and in the last fifteen years the three largest cyclones in eastern Australia have hit in that time frame).
In the aftermath of this bit of a storm, nearly every Araucariaceae tree I have seen has had nearly mature cones that were broken off by the winds. Cones that break up and have their seeds dispersed on the wind, and cones that would have been mature during the prime period of storm season. During the Mesozoic and early Cenozoic, when cyclones would have been common and they would have reached higher latitudes and there were ample shallow seas for them to develop in, I can see why these trees were quite dominant. A bunya seed is quite heavy (the kernel can get to the size of a small chicken egg (they are also delicious)), but carried on a cyclone force wind it would – in its scale covering – be blown a fair distance. All these trees take the destructive force of these winds on the chin, generally being stripped of branches long before the main trunk can be damaged.

Ground covers Grasslands, shrublands and 'Fern savannas', 'fern prairies' and shrublands.
Grasses seem to have evolved in Gondwana somewhere and we actually have the first preserved instance of terrestrial grasses (as opposed to waterside and bog-dwelling reeds and sedges, which were present much earlier) alongside the remains of other flowering plants and cycads within the coprolite of a South American Titanosaur, along with the remains of rice in the coprolites of Indian titanosaurs, like Isisaurus. Meanwhile, the earliest known member of the family that contains grasses is fossilised in the corprolite of a mid-Cretaceous Asian hadrosaurid (although this was a small nondescript forest dwelling plant similar to the modern primitive grass Anomochloa).

Before grasses became dominant in the Oligocene, there seems to be evidence indicating that open environments mainly consisted of shrubland or heath-like vegetation. These environments obviously still exist in the modern day – saltbush shrubland being a prime example – in arid or semi-arid areas around the globe. Low tropical heath land/ shrubland is still present although it's generally considered an endangered environment (mainly because of human development in coastal areas).

Personally I find the idea of fern dominated seasonal savannas during the mesozoic quite interesting. Just going off of examples from the modern day I'd suggest that perhaps communities would vary for soil types but types of plants would involve selaginellan clubmosses (these include some modern arid adapted plants like the resurrection plant of Mexico and bigilow's spikemoss of Southern California) and arid adapted ferns – similar in growth habit to bracken – that spread through rhizomes under the ground and can survive dry spells by drying off and throwing up new growth. Onto the more speculative side, it would not be outrageous to suggest a similar behaviour in lycopsid clubmosses. We also have the dry weather and fire adapted marattian tree fern Weichselia reticulata from the Las Hoyas formation of Spain, which is completely unlike any modern marattian fern(which grow in rainforests in SE Asia and Oceania in very moist spots). It is entirely possible that it had shared relatives with more recognisably modern king ferns that would have also lived in these environments and either became dormant or shed their leaves for the dry season and threw up new growth with the rains.

It would seem that low shrubland, or similar environments to modern heaths would likely have been common as well, and conifers with low shrubby or stunted heath-like growth are certainly a very likely candidate.

Mangrove communities.
It would seem that in the Early Jurassic, we may have had seed ferns living in a mangrovous way alongside giant horsetails. It is not hard to imagine this having been the case since the late Carboniferous. It is possible they were living besides saline-adapted cheirolepid conifers by the Early Jurassic. By the Late Jurassic, Cheirolepidiaceae are seemingly common in these communities and by the Early Cretaceous in the Czech Republic we also have evidence for a species of mangrove ginkgos. In the mid-Cretaceous of North Africa, we have what seem to be mangrove communities of Weichselia reticulata (I'd imagine it would be a different species to the Spanish one mentioned above?) and horsetails.
At this time we get some more vegetation beds from Hațeg Island, which is really, really good. It seems we have mangrove ferns, cheirolepids, and maybe Weichselia reticulata again in these communities.
By the latest Cretaceous, mangrove palms (Nypa) seem to have been present in India, (so maybe more widespread in the Gondwanan tropics in general), and by the mid-Eocene, recognisably modern flowering mangrove trees were starting to spread around the tropics globally.

This is the more 'evidence based speculation' side of it.
Morrison Formation trace fossils.



Okay so you guessed it, it always comes back to the Morrison formation with me. The simple fact is that it is the most researched terrestrial Mesozoic environment we have, it is one of the largest formations geographically and we have quite a large variety of different type and sized dinosaurs.
Because the rivers were distinctly sandy channels, the flood plain is largely distinctive mudstone and the lakes are their own distinctive alkaline mudstone, we can have some really cool insights.

So we get sauropod footprints regularly on the flood plain and occasionally on lime mudstone. This is interpreted as them walking on the plain after a flood, or using the muddy shore of the lakeside to explore and perhaps graze the edges of the lakeside forest whilst the water level is low. We very, very rarely have sauropod footprints on what can be identified as riverside sandstone. My theory at the moment is that I do not think adult sauropods could penetrate the thick gallery forest, or really any dense closed forest. Sure, I think there would be crossing points and they'd graze on the river banks around these areas but I do not imagine them regularly pushing into the forest. I think more open and fragmented forest, or the edges of closed forests would have offered much better grazing than within the canopy of a closed forest and I think this applies to most large and giant sauropod species.


Camarasaurus forage in an open section of the forest. There is more room to easily move around and the fragmentary nature of the vegetation means there is effectively more forest edge to browse from.

This is my thought on the matter; these animals are not built to push through walls of branches, they are not built like elephants. And even then, forest elephants are smaller than plains elephants. Smaller species and juveniles on the other hand could more easily fit in between trees and navigate forests.

We get footprints from Allosaurus and Stegosaurus in all three areas pretty regularly, whilst we rarely find Camptosaurus footprints out on the flood plain. This makes a ton of sense to me personally. A Camptosaurus, being bison-sized, is probably not going to find many places to hide if it runs into trouble on the flood plain. Small ornithopods and small theropods could likely hide in vegetation such as under cycad thickets, and, on the topic of stamina, most herbivorous dinosaurs (aside from sauropods who were not the world's fastest or most nimble runners anyway) had lost the airsack system that gives theropods, pterosaurs and modern birds really quite good endurance. Therefore, Camptosaurus seems to have stuck near forested areas, and for a foraging animal there was probably a larger amount of seeds and nutritious, well-watered vegetation in these areas. Allosaurus was literally everywhere in the Morrison, it was the most common theropod (and is the most common dinosaur found). Whether it was getting around in groups or not is kinda irrelevant to this point, larger predators than it were seemingly so rare on the landscape that Allosaurus straight out dominates and goes where it wants. The risk of being ambushed or run down and torn apart by a Torvosaurus or Saurophaganax is a pretty remote possibility for the average adult Allosaurus (although I do not doubt it was a threat; Torvosaurus was the same size but twice the weight (which counts for a lot) whilst Saurophaganax was around twice and a half to three times heavier, so both predators would have been extremely dangerous, and most definitely would have predated on smaller theropods). Stegosaurus is obviously quite armed and armoured so I do not think it'd be deterred from visiting certain environments by the threat of predators, especially as it was a herding animal.

This raises some interesting points to me when considering other species and environments: Were there possible physical barriers in the environment to this species, or perhaps environments that are particularly perilous? Where would the most productive areas be for it to find food? What is its strategy to avoid predation, run or fight; can it outrun its predators and hide? Where in the landscape would it live? And how would these questions be affected by other creatures in the environment?

Game trails
There is little evidence for non-avian dinosaurs leaving game trails, although saying this they'd likely be left in areas which would not be suitable for preservation. I thought I'd read about a sauropod game track, although I can't for the life of me find it again. I think it is highly likely that, just like animals today, dinosaurs would have left well-tread and shared trails through the landscape. With many modern animals using elephant tracks in modern day Africa and Asia, it's not hard to imagine mammoths acting like the snow plows of the steppe, or sauropods essentially paving the highways the the Mesozoic. Concentrations of dung along these trails would attract intense insect activity, which would in turn attract smaller animals, such as crocodiliformes, pterasaurs, ornithopods, small certatopsians, and juvenile therapods.


Large herbivore tracks, through the fern prairie in the Psittacosaurus pen demonstrating a source of insects.

Firstly I find Wikipedia will generally be helpful to get an idea of what was in the area at the time and to find modern relatives and relative time spans of different plant families, and the basic forms and traits of plant species that are around today.

Although this being said it always takes a bit of decoding with paleobotany, as spore/pollen branch/trunk leaf and fruit/flower fossils will if not found in close association be referred to different taxa.

I now own three really great books, and on the lookout for more!
J.Ijouiher 2022The Desert Bones: The paleontology and paleoecology of Mid-Cretaceous North Africa Indiana University Press Bloomington

J. Foster 2020 Jurrasic West: The Dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation and Their World Indiana University Press Bloomington

F Jose Poyato-Ariza & A Buscalioni 2016: Las Hoyas a Cretaceous Wetland; A multidisciplinary synthesis after 25 years of research on an exceptional fossil lagerstatte from Spain Verlag Dr. Friedrich Pfeil Munchen

Okay, so I only use free access papers, as this is more a hobby, and indulgence of curiosity than something I'm going to spend money on.
[Note from Magnanimous Matt: where necessary I've filled in information about formations with the occasional paper that isn't open-access (university perks, you know). Sorry about that, some info just isn't available otherwise.]

Alley N. Archer M, Blackburn D, Carpenter R, Christophel D, Dettmann M, Douglas J, Godthelp H , Greenwood D, Hand S, Jordan G, Kershaw P, MartinA, McEwen Mason C, Macphail K, Quilty G, SluiterI K, Taylor G, Truswell M, WilfordE 2007: History of the Australian Vegetation Cretaceous-Present Published in Adelaide by
University of Adelaide Press. Adelaide

Byers, B.A., DeSoto, L., Chaney, D. et al. Fire-scarred fossil tree from the Late Triassic shows a pre-fire drought signal. Sci Rep 10, 20104 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-77018-w

Cifelli, Richard & Gardner, James & Nydam, Randall & Brinkman, Daniel. (1997). Additions to the vertebrate fauna of the Antlers Formation (Lower Cretaceous), southeastern Oklahoma. Oklahoma Geology Notes. 57. 124-131.

DAVIES-VOLLUM, K. SIAN, et al. “A LATE CRETACEOUS CONIFEROUS WOODLAND FROM THE SAN JUAN BASIN, NEW MEXICO.” PALAIOS, vol. 26, no. 1/2, 2011, pp. 89–98. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25835603. Accessed 21 Jan. 2023.

Falcon-Lang, Howard & Kvaček, Jiří & Uličný, David. (2001). Fire-prone plant communities and palaeoclimate of a Late Cretaceous fluvial to estuarine environment, Pecínov quarry, Czech Republic. Geological Magazine - GEOL MAG. 138. 10.1017/S0016756801005714.

Falcon-Lang, Howard & Kvaček, Jiří & Uličný, David. (2006). Mesozoic mangroves. GeoScientist. 16. 4-6.

Kustatscher E, van Konijnenburg-van Citterto J The Ladinian Flora(Middle Triassic) of the Dolomites: Palaeoenviromental reconstructions and Palaeoclimatic ConsiderationsGeo.Alp, Vol. 2, S. 31–51, 2005

Lindfors, Sandra & Csiki-Sava, Zoltan & Grigorescu, Dan & Friis, Else. (2010). Preliminary account of plant mesofossils from the Maastrichtian Budurone microvertebrate site of the Haţeg Basin, Romania. Palaeogeography Palaeoclimatology Palaeoecology. 293. 353-359. 10.1016/j.palaeo.2009.10.018.
Michael, Wachtler. (2012). Michael Wachtler (2010): About the origin of Cycads and some enigmatic Angiosperm-like fructifications from the Early-Middle Triassic (Anisian) Braies Dolomites (Northern Italy),.

Mccarthy, Paul & Flaig, Peter & Fiorillo, Anthony. (2010). Paleoenvironmental interpretation of an ancient Arctic coastal plain: Integrated paleopedology and palynology from the Late Cretaceous (Maastrichtian) Prince Creek Formation, North Slope, Alaska, USA. AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts.

Miller, I.M. & Johnson, Kirk & Kline, D.E. & Nichols, D.J. & Barclay, Richard. (2013). A Late Campanian Flora from the Kaiparowits Formation, southern Utah, and a brief overview of the widely sampled but little-known Campanian vegetation of the Western Interior of North America. At the Top of the Grand Staircase: The Late Cretaceous of southern Utah. 107-131.

Murchie TJ, Monteath AJ, Mahony ME, Long GS, Cocker S, Sadoway T, Karpinski E, Zazula G, MacPhee RDE, Froese D, Poinar HN. Collapse of the mammoth-steppe in central Yukon as revealed by ancient environmental DNA. Nat Commun. 2021 Dec 8;12(1):7120. doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-27439-6. PMID: 34880234; PMCID: PMC8654998.

Lehman, T. Habitat of the giant pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus Lawson 1975 (Pterodactyloidea: Azhdarchoidea): a paleoenvironmental reconstruction of the Javelina Formation (Upper Cretaceous), Big Bend National Park, Texas. Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology.13 Sep 2018 Pages 21-45 | Received 11 Oct 2017, Accepted , Published online: 07 Dec 2021

Francyne Bochi do Amarante, Claiton M.S. Scherer, César Alejandro Goso Aguilar, Adriano Domingos dos Reis, Valeria Mesa, Matías Soto; Fluvial-eolian deposits of the Tacuarembó formation (Norte Basin – Uruguay): Depositional models and stratigraphic succession, Journal of South American Earth Sciences, Volume 90, 2019,

Rauhut, Oliver & Schwermann, Achim & Hübner, Tom & Lanser, Klaus-Peter. (2020). The oldest record of the genus Torvosaurus (Theropoda: Megalosauridae) from the Callovian Ornatenton Formation of north-western Germany. Geologie und Palaeontologie in Westfalen. 93.

Sabrina Lizzoli, M. Sol Raigemborn, Augusto N. Varela,
Controls of pedogenesis in a fluvial-eolian succession of Cenomanian age in northern Patagonia,
Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology,
Volume 577,

https://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/0098s/report.pdf

Willerslev, E., Davison, J., Moora, M. et al. Fifty thousand years of Arctic vegetation and megafaunal diet. Nature 506, 47–51 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12921

Yulong Xie, Fuli Wu, Xiaomin Fang,A transient south subtropical forest ecosystem in central China driven by rapid global warming during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum,Gondwana Research,Volume 101,

Dario De Franceschi, Carina Hoorn, Pierre-Olivier Antoine, Iqbal U. Cheema,
Lawrence J. Flynn , Everett H. Lindsay , Laurent Marivaux , Grégoire Métais ,
A. Rahim Rajpar , Jean-Loup Welcomme(2008): Floral data from the mid-Cenozoic of central PakistanDépartement Histoire de la Terre, Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle

Mongolia: A Revised Faunal List'
MELLETT. JThe Oligocene Hsanda Gol Formation,(AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY)

Basal abelisaurid and carcharodontosaurid theropods from
the Lower Cretaceous Elrhaz Formation of Niger
PAUL C. SERENO and S


I also find some certain blogs are very helpful, especially very well researched blogs.

Brian Engh: Don't Mess with Dinosaurs: Painting the Menefee Formation Mural at Western Science Center. Historian on 04 Aug 2022
Don't Mess with Dinosaurs: Mill Canyon Dinosaur Trackway. Historian 2015

Mark Witton: Mark P. Witton's Blog 2 Windows into Early Cretaceous Britain: the plant debris beds of the Wessex Formation Mark Witton 2013

Maija Karala: Humming Dinosaurs and Nature's Other Small Wonders: Flora in the Time of Chasmosaurs (botany for paleoartists, part IV) Maija Karala 2014

Humming Dinosaurs and Nature's Other Small Wonders:Dinosaurs of the Taiga (botany for paleoartists part VII) Maija Karala 2014

And of course the Speaker Series of lectures from the Royal Tyrelll museum. Which is just incredible. Would urge you all to check it out

Royal Tyrrell Museum Speaker Series 2013 John Harris - George C. Page Museum, La Brea Tar Pits, LA "Pleistocene Mammals of North America: Treasures from the La Brea Tar Pits. published April 9, 2013.

Royal Tyrrell Museum Speaker Series 2023- Dr. Caroline Strömberg, The Evolution of Grasslands: What Plant Fossils Reveal About One of the Largest Ecosystem Changes. Presented by of the University of Washington, Seattle, March 23, 2023. published April 21, 2023

Sereno PC, Wilson JA, Witmer LM, Whitlock JA, Maga A, Ide O, Rowe TA. Structural extremes in a cretaceous dinosaur. PLoS One. 2007 Nov 21;2(11):e1230. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0001230. PMID: 18030355; PMCID: PMC2077925.

Tonni, Eduardo. “Predominance of Arid Climates Indicated by Mammals in the Pampas of Argentina during the Late Pleistocene and Holocene.” Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology (1999): n. pag. Print.

Vizcaino S F. 'Vegetation Partitioning among Lujanian (Late-Pleistocene/Early-Holocene) Armored Herbivores in the Pampean Region' CPR 17 (2000) web PDF.

Flores-Barragan, Miguel & Velasco, Patricia. (2021). New records of Bjuvia and Nilssonia from the Permian of Mexico. Palaeontologia Electronica. 10.26879/1109.

Gustavo Martínez a,*, María A. Gutiérrez a, Eduardo P. Tonni b Paleoenvironments and faunal extinctions: Analysis of the archaeological assemblages at the Paso Otero locality (Argentina) during the Late PleistoceneeEarly Holocene: Quaternary International. (August 2012)

Edward Wilber Berry, A Lower Lance Florule from Harding County, South Dakota
(Geologic survey)Shorter contributions to general geology, (1934-1935)

Candela Blanco-Moreno, Cyrille Prestianni, Taxonomic revision and palaeoecological interpretation of the plant assemblage of Bernissart (Barremian, Belgium), Cretaceous Research, Volume 124, 2021, 104814,
ISSN 0195-6671, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cretres.2021.104814.

Spagna, Paolo & Yans, Johan & Schnyder, Johann & Dupuis, Christian. (2012). Reconstruction of the Iguanodons environment based on the sedimentological study of wealden facies in and around the Bernissart natural pit, Mons Basin (Belgium)..

Karasev et al. “Chapter 13 Flora of the Late Triassic.” (2017).

Rodríguez-López, J.P., Wu, C., Vishnivetskaya, T.A. et al. Permafrost in the Cretaceous supergreenhouse. Nat Commun 13, 7946 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-35676-6

Alley, N. F., ♥♥♥♥, S. B., & Frakes, L. A. (2019). Glaciations at high-latitude Southern Australia during the Early Cretaceous. Australian Journal of Earth Sciences, 67(8), 1045–1095. https://doi.org/10.1080/08120099.2019.1590457

Wang, Y., Peng, N., Kuang, H., Zhao, F., Liu, Y., Yang, Z., … Qi, K. (2022). Relict sand wedges suggest a high altitude and cold temperature during the Early Cretaceous in the Ordos Basin, North China. International Geology Review, 65(6), 900–919. https://doi.org/10.1080/00206814.2022.2081938

Juan Pedro Rodríguez-López, Carlos L. Liesa, Aránzazu Luzón, Arsenio Muñoz, María J. Mayayo, Julian B. Murton, Ana R. Soria; Ice-rafted dropstones at midlatitudes in the Cretaceous of continental Iberia. Geology 2023;; 52 (1): 33–38. doi: https://doi.org/10.1130/G51725.1

Paul Olsen et al. ,Arctic ice and the ecological rise of the dinosaurs.Sci. Adv.8,eabo6342(2022).DOI:10.1126/sciadv.abo6342

Anne-Marie P. Tosolini, Vera A. Korasidis, Barbara E. Wagstaff, David J. Cantrill, Stephen J. Gallagher, Martin S. Norvick, Palaeoenvironments and palaeocommunities from Lower Cretaceous high-latitude sites, Otway Basin, southeastern Australia, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, Volume 496, 2018, Pages 62-84, ISSN 0031-0182,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2018.01.017.

Farabee, Michael & Canright, J.E.. (1986). Stratigraphic palynology of the lower part of the Lance Formation (Maestrichtian) of Wyoming. Palaeontographica B. 199. 1-89.

Havlik, Philipe & Aiglstorfer, Manuela & El Atfy, Haytham & Uhl, Dieter. (2013). A peculiar bonebed from the Norian Stubensandstein (Löwenstein Formation, Late Triassic) of southern Germany and its palaeoenvironmental interpretation. Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie - Abhandlungen. 269. 321-337. 10.1127/0077-7749/2013/0354.

The Palaeoflora of Cretaceous Asia by Tom Parker and Chris Masna: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/lxO2Oa

Sun, Ge & A., Akhmetiev & Golovneva, L. & Bugdaeva, Eugenia & Kodrul, T. & Nishida, Harufumi & Sun, Yuewu & Sun, Chunlin & Johnson, Kirk & Dilcher, David. (2007). Late Cretaceous Plants from Jiayin along Heilongjiang River, Northeast China. CFS Courier Forschungsinstitut Senckenberg. 258. 75-83.

Zhang, J.-W., D’Rozario, A., Adams, J.M., Li, Y., Liang, X.-Q., Jacques, F.M., Su, T. and Zhou, Z.-K. (2015), Sequoia maguanensis, a new Miocene relative of the coast redwood, Sequoia sempervirens, from China: Implications for paleogeography and paleoclimate†. American Journal of Botany, 102: 103-118. https://doi.org/10.3732/ajb.1400347

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312576356_Environmental_adaptations_and_constraints_on_latest_Cretaceous_Arctic_dinosaurs

Mandel, J. R., Dikow, R. B., Siniscalchi, C. M., Thapa, R., Watson, L. E., & Funk, V. A. (2019). A fully resolved backbone phylogeny reveals numerous dispersals and explosive diversifications throughout the history of Asteraceae. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(28), 14083–14088. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1903871116



Guide by Teutonicus
Proofreading, paleobotany plant entries and some general edits and additions by Magnanimous Matt