Dinosaur Provincial Park is a fossil site spanning the time approximately between 76,6-74,8 million years ago, in Alberta, Canada. It’s a famous site with well-known dinosaurs. There are ceratopsians such as Chasmosaurus and Styracosaurus, hadrosaurs such as Corythosaurus and ankylosaurs like Edmontonia. Most famously, the area was haunted by great tyrannosaurs Daspletosaurus and Gorgosaurus.
Less famously, the site also has a fairly good record of fossil plants. At the time, the area was a flat, forested plain with dozens of sediment-laden rivers slowly meandering towards the Western Interior Seaway. The climate was warm temperate, and plenty of ponds and swamps dotted the landscape. This gorgeous and accurate painting is by Julius Csotonyi, from this PLOS One paper, with Creative Commons license.
Let’s now take a closer look at the variety of plants that flourished in the area and fed the dinosaurs.