HISTORY AND SIGNIFICANCE OF EAST COAST DINOSAURS

Dinosaurs from North America have been known ever since the middle of the 19th century. While some of the earliest discoveries come from the Western Interior, it was the East Coast that contributed important, and steady flow of, information on these dinosaurs to the present day. Beginning with the understandably famous theropod footprints of the Connecticut Valley (Late Triassic) to Hadrosaurus foulkii, the earliest-exhibited dinosaur skeleton, from the Late Cretaceous of New Jersey, the dinosaurs of the East Coast are now known from Nova Scotia in the north to South Carolina (Atlantic Coast) and Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi (Gulf Coast). The stratigraphic distribution of these dinosaurs ranges from the Upper Triassic-Lower Jurassic Newark Supergroup through the Upper Cretaceous marine sequence along the Atlantic and Gulf coastal plain, although so far no sites are known from the Middle and Upper Jurassic (the Jurassic hiatus). The only Lower Cretaceous strata to yield dinosaur remains are the so-called Arundel Clay and the Patuxent Formation of Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. Over the past 25 years, there has been a 1.8-fold increase in dinosaur localities known from the East Coast over those previously known, generally in keeping with increases in localities known from elsewhere in the world. The significance of East coast dinosaurs for phylogenetic relationships and global biogeography will also be discussed.