Land-dwelling animals and plants

Hausmannia dichotoma

1. Hausmannia dichotoma belonged to a family of ferns whose numbers decreased during the Cretaceous due to increasing competition from other ferns and flowering plants.
2. Hausmannia was a small fern that lived in warm and damp forests. Its modern relatives live mainly in the warm and damp forests of Southeast Asia.

Cunninghamites squamosus

Cunninghamites is an extinct coniferous tree that is related to modern cypresses. It was common in what is now Europe during the Cretaceous. The small leaves and cones may be adaptations that helped it to survive dry periods.

Cunninghamites squamosus

Cunninghamites is a large, extinct coniferous tree that is related to modern cypresses. You can see the cones with ripe seeds.

Laccopteris

1. Laccopteris belonged to a family of ferns with many species that lived during the Jurassic and Early Cretaceous. Today there are only five species remaining and, like Laccopteris, they thrive in warm and damp forests.
2. The modern relatives live in Southeast Asian forests. Laccopteris, however, grew in the warm and damp forests of what is now Quedlinburg, Germany.

Nathorstiana

Nathorstiana belonged to a group of plants called quillworts, which first evolved during the Carboniferous. Then, they were larger and more abundant. Today they are comparatively small. They grew near lakes and rivers.

Carcharodontosaurus saharicus

This tooth is typical of meat-eating dinosaurs. If you compare it with mosasaur teeth, you can see that they are curved and have sharp cutting edges, while the dinosaur tooth is flat.

It also has an indentation in the back cutting edge, just like some meat-cutting knives. Carcharodontosaurus lived in North Africa and was as big as Tyrannosaurus rex, but more slightly built.

Camarasaurus

This tooth, which is 13 centimetres long, is shaped like a chisel and is typical of plant-eating dinosaurs. The broad teeth with long roots indicate that Camarasaurus probably ate more tough plant parts than, for example, Diplodocus which had narrow teeth.

Camarasaurus lived during the early Jurassic. The tooth has been placed here, in the exhibition’s Cretaceous section, to show the difference between plant-eater and meat-eater teeth.

Carpolithes

When only seeds are found, it is difficult to determine which plant they come from. Carpolithes is a collective term for fossils of such seeds. These large fossil seeds are from the Cretaceous.

Credneria denticulata

Credneria belonged to the plane-tree family.

It was a large flowering tree that grew near coastlines. It was one of the many flowering plants that evolved during the Cretaceous.

Cycad

Cycads grow today in tropical or subtropical regions of the world. This Early Cretaceous cycad fossil comes from the middle latitudes of Germany, indicating that much warmer climates prevailed in what is now Europe.

Bignonia westerhausiana

Bignonia westerhausiana probably had showy flowers and belonged to the bignonia or catalpa family of woody plants.

Spiropteris

It is difficult to determine the species of some fossil ferns. That is the case, for example, when the fronds are rolled up; Spiropteris is a collective term for the coiled tips of such fossil ferns.

Hausmannia kohlmannii

Hausmannia kohlmannii was a small fern that thrived in warm and damp forests. It belonged to a family of ferns whose numbers decreased during the Cretaceous due to increasing competition from other ferns and flowering plants.