Board Thread:Fossil Fuels/@comment-107.77.90.53-20171015152917/@comment-17754282-20171015194323

107.77.90.53 wrote: Well, you are right in the river bank in Jurassic World (I mentioned the JP3 bank on my post) part. But I'm just saying this; does Ankylosaurus USUALLY behave in this manner in real life, given it living in Hell Creek in the Cretaceous Period, or do movie/video game makers envision them that way?

You are also right that Ankylosaurus could be uncomfortable around large sauropods, but Triceratops and Stegosaurus aren't scary enough for Ankylosaurus, are they? It's really hard to tell from fossils how they behaved. Most of the time dinosaur behaviour is largely based on assumptions, but even looking at animals that are alive today, most of them aren't particularly sociable with others not of their species. Most of the time, if you happen to see something like a whole load of Antelope, Zebra, Giraffe and Rhinos together in Africa, there's usually a reason for it, and its not because they're all actually BBF's - it'll be something like its the dry season so they're all gathered together at a single watering hole and are tolerating each others' presence. And even then, most of those animals will stick close to their own kind.

Ankylosaurus fossils are pretty rare when compared to some of the other herbivores of its time, like Triceratops and Edmontosaurus, so its entirely possible that Ankylosaurus may have been pretty solitary, either moving along alone or in twos or threes.

You cannot however just assume that animals being found in the same formation means they lived together. Despite living at the same time as each other, Triceratops, Edmontosaurus and Thescelosaurus all preferred coastal lowlands and floodplains while Ankylosaurus was more of a upland animal and Pachycephalosaurus may in fact have lived in mountainous areas.