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Fossils may be found either associated with a geological formation or at a single geographic site. Geological formations consist of rock that was deposited during a specific period of time. They usually extend for large areas, and sometimes there are different important sites in which the same formation is exposed.
Fossil footprints are the most common kind of early dinosaur fossil in the eastern United States. [57] As the Triassic ended, Pangaea was breaking up into separate continents again. Rift valleys formed along the east coast as the North American, European and African plates diverged. [58] This process created rifts down the east coast to Florida ...
The first reasonably correct identification of a vertebrate fossil in North America was made in 1725, at a South Carolina plantation called Stono. [7] There slaves had uncovered several large fossil teeth while digging in a swamp. The slaves unanimously identified the teeth as elephant molars, which they would have recognized from life in Africa.
The history of paleontology traces the history of the effort to understand the history of life on Earth by studying the fossil record left behind by living organisms. Since it is concerned with understanding living organisms of the past, paleontology can be considered to be a field of biology, but its historical development has been closely tied to geology and the effort to understand the ...
The location of the United States in North America. A substantial amount of paleontological research has occurred within or conducted by people from the United States. Paleontologists have found that at the start of the Paleozoic era, what is now "North" America was actually in the southern hemisphere. Marine life flourished in the country's ...
Fossils of Tawa-like dinosaurs have also been found in South America, which has important indications about paleogeography. During the Early Jurassic Period , dinosaurs such as Dilophosaurus , Anchisaurus , Coelophysis (formerly known as Megapnosaurus ), and the early thyreophoran Scutellosaurus lived in North America.
(Click to zoom) See legend below This is the legend for the North American geological map above. Geologic map of North America. The geology of North America is a subject of regional geology and covers the North American continent, the third-largest in the world. Geologic units and processes are investigated on a large scale to reach a ...
Nodosaurid scutes have been commonly found in eastern North America, while fossil specimens are very rare. Often the findings are not diagnostic enough to identify the species, but the remains attest to a greater number of these armored dinosaurs in Appalachia.