Will the hadrosaurs and sauropods also have wetland requirements? A slider amount such as is seen in M2 area on their information sheet. Meaning, dinosaurs will require area of forest, grass and water in specific amounts. The wetland requirements are not simply based on the spinosaurids and the fish feeder, correct?
Hadrosaurs and sauropods are terrestrial animals. They didn't live in swamps. That idea has been outdated for over 50 years now.
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With the sheer bodysize, they would use hundreds of gallons of water for drinking, and hadrosaurs would need to ingest copious amounts of water to digest early grass, cyads and ferns without a multi-chambered stomach. And besides, this is Jurassic Park universe, not actuality. So my question remains..
That could apply to a dozen other herbivores too. I don't really see the point of extending this feature to other animals that didn't have a semi-aquatic lifestyle and Frontier has stated this would only apply to Spinosaurids including the Spinoraptor.
Actually, no.
The need to drink is quite different for the enviromental one. Even a Brachiosaur could meet her needs with a tiny fountain or water source, providing it keeps gushing water non-stop.
But no spinosaur could live with just a small fountain or tiny drinker if their stomachs are used to fish and their skin most likely has adapted to their prey's habitat.
No need to condescend, bud. His point is, a sauropod only requires water to drink from, and since the water in the game never runs out, there's no reason to require bigger wetlands in their preferred habitats. Spinosaurids, on the other hand, spend a great deal of their time in the water, not just to drink from it. Water is primarily where they hunted, so they would have a bigger natural inclination to be near water at all times compared to sauropods. Just because one is physically much larger, it doesn't mean that it has an equal need for a water-based habitat. It's like comparing a giraffe to a crocodile. A giraffe is much bigger, but it more or less only interacts with water it needs to drink from it. Crocodiles, on the other hand, require a water-based habitat because they are at least semi-aquatic. They hunt and thrive in water and therefore have a much bigger need for large bodies of water in their habitat.
Because your argument seemed to be based on body size rather than lifestyle. Spinosaurids are the only dinosaurs in the game that we know had a preference for wetlands due to their somewhat of a semi-aquatic lifestyle that needed water for purposes other than drinking and would have been well-suited for water-based habitats due to those requirements. This has not been proven to apply for any other dinosaur in the game and since the game doesn't have a mechanic where the water dries or runs out, herbivores including sauropods can drink infinitely from a small pond, which therefore negates the need for a more water-based habitat.
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African elephants do fine in the desert and generally live in arid environments.
Sauropods are generally seem to have been terrestrial animals with little to no adaptation to wetter environments. With a giant body like that you kinda also want solid ground to stand on. They need water to drink but have no need to live in or near water all the time.
Some specific dinosaurs including Sauropods might have favoured a more wet environment for various reasons, but generally it's safe to assume that a sauropod mainly lived on land.
One example if it would get added of a Sauropod that might fit a wetlands environment is Rebbachisaurus. It's fossils are found in the the Kem Kem beds where it shared it's habitat with Spinosaurus and Carcharodontosaurus. That was a big river delta. So there are exceptions.
It's hard to tell if an animal actually lived in the environment it's found in though. So It's best to look at actual direct examples of feeding. Of course there's the example of Onchopristis (giant sawfish) teeth lodged in the jaw of Spinosaurus. But the studies that have been done on the isotopes in dinosaur teeth are particularly interesting. Or studies that look at in what association different animals are found. There are several dinosaurs that regularly ate fish. Ceratosaurs have been found to eat more fish than dinosaur meat. Megalosaurs also ate their fair share. Seasons can sometimes also be recovered from teeth due to how the animal fed. Ceratosaurs seemed to have fed on fish for most of the year, while Allosaurus seemed to have eaten fish just occasionally and might have mostly been passing through the area just like the large herbivores.
And while hadrosaurs seem to have been mostly terrestrial and there's no good reason to suggest they were semi aquatic, they have been found to have eaten crustaceans like crabs. So they weren't (or at least not all of them) exclusively herbivores. But then cows, deer and even giraffes have been known to scavenge dead animals, so they aren't exclusive herbivores either.
Grassland actually make sense. Few species live exclusively under heavy forest canopy and particularly most grazing herbivores would need to feed from plant species that wouldn't grow within forests.
Also, I imagine they would all have used sunlight for nutrient synthesis much like we ourselves need it for certain vitamins.
There are other reasons for them to go into the open, though. Water sources located out of forest have a higher chance of not being contaminated by bacteria growing of the fallen leaves, light and temperature conditions.
Or it could be just a need as basic as mating. Courting displays would have been undoubtedly easier on grasslands than under forest cover.
Anyway, we don't really know what the true Cretaceous land looked like because fossil registry is far from representative, so this is all speculative. Adding swamp requirements to all species based only om that they needed to drink does seem rather pointless, though.
We actually know a lot about some specific ecosystems, like the Hell Creek formation. It's been quite well studied.
Yeah, but I meant, all those sites don't cover the whole of the Earth. There were supposedly many other landmasses that didn't had flood plains, swamps and all those particular conditions that make fossil-making easy, so the animals and ecosystems that existed there cannot be equally studied and known.
Oh yes definitely. There's a lot we will never know because many areas are just lost to time. But with the areas that we can find out about more, there are also still many that haven't been studied a lot. For example the Kem Kem beds where among others Spinosaurus and Carcharodontosaurus are found, we really don't know a whole lot about that ecosystem yet. But hopefully this might change in the near future.