Spec-Dinovember Day 7: Cliffhanger, a species adapted to mountainous environments
The Laramide orogeny began around 80 million years ago and was the final stage in building the Rocky Mountains. The Laramide is set apart from its predecessors by its characteristic thick-skin deformation, bringing igneous basement rock to the surface via thrust and reverse faulting. This means there would have been a significant area of high mountainous terrain when the last dinosaur communities roamed the American West. Surely some species had to be adapted to this environment right? Here a lineage of Leptoceratopsid has stepped in to fill the niche. Its arms and metacarpals are proportionally longer, making its limbs closer to equal in length for ease of climbing. Its fingers and toes have enlarged fat pads with small rough scales to better conform to the uneven surfaces and maximize contact friction. The hallux is reversed and has a recurved claw rather than a hoof for use in grasping. Its body is slightly compressed laterally to allow it to keep its center of mass above its feet on near-vertical surfaces. The tail is shorter, slimmer, and more mobile at the base to better act as a counter-balance.
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My first thought for this prompt was a pachycephalosaur because of that one hypothesis of them being mountain dwellers due to the transport damage on their fossils, but I decided against it. Whatever I chose I knew it had to be from the Campanian/Maastrichtian of Laramidia because of the Laramide orogeny, and I knew I wasn't gonna have time to research Mesozoic mountain ranges. There's a couple others I know of that could have been interesting to explore, but I played it safe and went with a time & place I'm fairly familiar with. I decided on a Leptoceratopsid because A) you don't see too much of them around, and B) Ferrisaurus was discovered in the mountains of British Columbia and I thought that was a neat critter to put in that kind of extreme environment. Also Oh My God, what even are rocks? How the hell do you paint good looking rocks? those damn things took forever and I'm still not happy with them. Oh well, practice practice...
