Rivers in the desert by sadbaryonyx on DeviantArt (original) (raw)

“Mongolia, 70 MYA. A small herd of Barsboldia crosses a dry riverbed on its way back to the nesting colony after a long night foraging. In this desert, they can travel 70 kilometres or more just to find the slightest trace of food and water, often for several days. It is not an easy life, especially compared to that of their conspecifics of the large swamps, a land so far away from them that it may very well be just a legend.

However, their hardships may come to an end soon. The brief rainy season is imminent, and the bare ground under them will soon be flooded by seasonal streams, and the red sand around will turn green and full of lush vegetation which so far has endured in a dormant state. The Barsboldia themselves have coordinated the hatching of their eggs with this brief period of abundance. Their young will have just one or two months to grow strong enough to follow their parents on their migration, before the water disappears and the desert dies once again.”

Deserts are usually harsh places for big animals (for any animal, really), because, well, the bigger you are, the more you need to eat and drink just to stay alive. And yet, elephants and giraffes can be found living in the Namib desert. Namibian desert elephants in particular have been the inspiration for this piece. They survive by eating drought resistant plants and staying near known sources of water, mainly ephemeral rivers. In fact, the distance that the Barsboldias go through is similar to that of some herds in Namibia when travelling between river valleys, a trek that lasts a night. These proboscideans also show some physiological differences, being smaller, longer legged, and having broader feet. Though they aren’t very abundant, these elephants show that even large animals can be versatile enough to live in such harsh environments.

Barsboldia has, so far, only been found in the Nemegt Formation, in Mongolia, which was a large swampy area, and an ideal habitat for large herbivorous dinosaurs such as the ornithomimid Deinocheirus, the hadrosaur Saurolophus, the sauropod Nemegtosaurus and the therizinosaur Therizinosaurus. Not a very dry area. However, the neighbouring Djadochta Formation was a semi-arid and harsh environment, populated by the likes of ceratopsians, such as Protoceratops and Udanoceratops, ankylosaurs like Pinacosaurus, and the famous theropods Velociraptor and Oviraptor.

Now, the Djadochta is considered to be slightly older than the Nemegt, with the different environments being a result of a change in the climate, but they still are very close spatially and temporally, so much that even some researchers have argued that they were actually contemporaneous. Thus, the Nemegt would be a sort of great oasis akin to the Okavango delta, and perhaps some animals would’ve occasionally ventured towards the desert of the Djadochta. On the other hand, hadrosaur material has been found in the Djadochta, though it’s undetermined, so it has the same probability of belonging to Barsboldia as to any other species. Nevertheless, it is still plausible that some dinosaur genera may have had populations living in environments much harsher than the ones we normally associate them with.

Also, I just really liked the portrayal of this species in Prehistoric Planet as a long-distance traveller, always in search of water, like a dromedary of sorts. It really has become one of my favourite dinosaurs.