From the Dinosaur Collector

The Early Cretaceous of North America:

can be divided into three faunal zones.  First there is a Northern Boreal hadrosaurine zone.  The Central Interior is an arid zone characterized by the Deinonychus Tenontosaurus fauna through the middle Cretaceous.  An Acrocanthosaurus Astrodon Zone descended from the Late Jurassic fauna contained broken forests and savanah existed along the Gulf Coast to Maryland.   update 092206

In the Cretaceous the sea had split Laurasia into Asiamerica (East Asia and western North America) and Euramerica (Europe and eastern North America), and the continents had reached their current positions. New seas appeared in earlier land areas and the Southern continents became great islands.Land and sea temperatures rose throughout the Cretaceous, leading in many places to a return to the hot deserts of the Triassic. Mountains formed and seasons became more marked, land animals could no longer spread everywhere, and dinosaur families became more closely linked to particular continents and places. At the end of the Jurassic, most of the diplodocids became extinct in North America, and were replaced by successive waves of beaked dinosaurs specialized for low feeding. high feeding brachiosaurs are still present. This change in feeding pattern must have had an impact on plant evolution (plants and herbivores are always locked in evolutionary advance and counter-advance), and it has even been suggested that the increased pressure on low growing plants opened the way for a take-over by plants with the ability to grow rapidly and reproduce rapidly. Thus they could colonize a grazed area quickly and produce a new generation before the herbivores returned to crop the area again. One of the plant types best suited for such an environment would have been the angiosperms, or flowering plants. Today these make up most of what we recognize as plants, but in the late Jurassic were a struggling minority. Suddenly in the Cretaceous period and at the same time as the low feeding dinosaurs were taking over as the major herbivores, the angiosperms flourished.  

Toyway WWD Iguanodon. Custom McDonalds Disney Animal World Iguanodon. by Stephen Robertson who did a great job matching the colors to the Toyway figures.

The Toyway Walking with Dinosaurs Iguanodon with custom McDonalds Disney Animal World Iguanodon.  Stephen Robertson did a great job matching the colors to the Toyway figures.		Iguanodonts seem to have been everywhere Europe, Asia and North America with relatives in Africa, South Ameica and Australia. Many fossils originally assigned to Iguanodon now are be reassigned to seperate but realted speicies
The retired Carnegie Safari Deinonychus and a variety of Disney-Mattel iguanodons.		Starting to the left are two green UKRD iguanodon's and center a Toyway Iguanodon.  In the Center is a gray Carnegie Safari and a Bullyland Iguanodon.  To the right a Battat and Wild Safari Utahraptor with a painted Invicta Iguanodon.

As one of the first scientifically well-known dinosaurs, Iguanodon has occupied a small but notable place in the public's perception of dinosaurs, its artistic representation changing significantly in response to new interpretations of its remains.

.

Procon Iguanodon.Go to the next North American Early Cretaceous page with the arrows

Iguanodons

Acrocanthosaurus Astrodon Zone