Little ducks!

During the last ten years there have been several exciting discoveries of dinosaurs in states on the East Coast of the United States. While most of it is fragmentary, it still allows us to see what went on here in the later part of the Cretaceous. As a rule, the dinosaurs on the East Coast were smaller than their cousins out West. I've been involved with several  dinosaur digs in South Carolina in the last five years. Over 400 Late Cretaceous dinosaur fossils have been collected to date by a small group of dedicated collectors. Most of these are at the Charleston Museum and will be presented soon in a publication on the Dinosaurs of South Carolina. I'm sure that many dinosaur fossils have been found here in the last couple of hundred years. But with little information to go by they were most likely falsely identified and soon forgotten. A good example is a section of a Hadrosaridae (Duckbill dinosaur) that one of my volunteers found from one of our sites. He thought it was a piece of sandstone at first but decided to save it for me anyway. I had collected in the Hell Creek formation (Late Cretaceous) a few years earlier and recognized it immediately. It was part of the dentary from a maxilla. I dug out the pieces from one out west and they were an identical match.