When it comes to the Late Jurassic, we enjoy two lucky breaks. First, there were hugely diverse communities of dinosaurs living alongside rivers, lakes, and seas all around the world—the perfect places to bury fossils in sediments that later turned to rock. Second, these rocks are today exposed in places convenient for paleontologists—in sparsely populated and dry regions of the United States, China, Portugal, and Tanzania, where annoyances like buildings, highways, forests, lakes, rivers, and oceans don’t cover up the fossil booty.
