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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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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 ...
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 many seas. Later the seas were largely replaced by swamps, home to amphibians and early reptiles. When the continents had assembled into Pangaea drier conditions prevailed.
The Morrison Formation is a distinctive sequence of Upper Jurassic sedimentary rock that is found in the western United States, which has been the most fertile source of dinosaur fossils in North America. It is composed of mudstone, sandstone, siltstone and limestone and is light grey, greenish gray, or red.
Map of North America. This is a list of North American animals extinct in the Holocene that covers extinctions from the Holocene epoch, a geologic epoch that began about 11,650 years before present (about 9700 BCE) [A] and continues to the present day. [1] Recently extinct animals in the West Indies and Hawaii are in their own respective lists.