Where are the Dinosaurs in Ontario?
I've been watching "Walking with Dinosaurs" on BBC Earth.
There are lots of dinosaurs in Alberta. So, what about Ontario?
To give you a quick answer, our dinosaurs ended up being 'rock flour' ground up under advancing and retreating sheets of ice.
We do have the Devonian period with warm, shallow seas. Underwater millions of years ago.
Following is the information I could find about dinosaurs in Canada, especially Ontario. I've edited/ paraphrased but click the link to read the full article online.
GeoScienceInfo - Where are the dinosaurs?
...there is still a treasure trove of fossils just waiting to be uncovered here in Ontario. The fossils here are just much, much older than any dinosaur, because the time they lived in and thus the rocks that their remains eventually became fossilized within are much older. The rocks in southwestern Ontario range in age from the late Ordovician Period (about 455 million years) to the Late Devonian Period (about 360 million years). That is roughly 205-130 million years before the first dinosaur strutted on the scene.
The Mesozoic Era, sometimes colloquially called the Age of the Dinosaurs, lasted approximately 165 million years. Given that there would have been many billions of individual dinosaurs during that time, the remains of many little and big critters would have absolutely been buried in the sediments and later undergone fossilization across Ontario.
About 2.5 million years ago, global temperatures began to drop significantly, and ice sheets started to grow on the continents.
In North America, the Laurentide ice sheet covered most of Canada and some parts of the United States a number of times, as it advanced and retreated repeatedly in cycles of growth and shrinkage in response to climatic conditions. The ice sheet literally scraped many layers of rock away, turning whatever got in its way into a fine powder called “rock flour”. All those poor dinosaur fossils that waited so patiently to get their place of honour in a paleontology museum were instead ground up into dust.
Although glacial activity removed the fascinating rocks layers of the dinosaur-saturated Mesozoic Era here in Ontario, it ended up exposing the just-as-fascinating rock layers of the even older Paleozoic Era. The rocks that lie at or near the surface in southwestern Ontario range in age from the Upper (or late) Ordovician Period (about 455 million years old) around the Belleville to Peterborough area and get progressively younger as you drive southwest towards the Arkona area, where they are late Devonian in age (about 360 million years old). Although the fossils found in these rocks differ among species, there are many common types of fossils found in many of the limestone, dolostone, and shale outcrops throughout southwestern Ontario, from Ordovician to Devonian rock units.
Some of the most common types of fossils found in southwestern Ontario are corals. Although they look like plants, corals are actually marine animals that usually lived attached to the seafloor. The fossilized corals here in southwestern Ontario are either tabulate (colonial-type) or rugose (solitary and colonial type) corals. Other fossils are found in these rocks, such as brachiopods, gastropods, bivalves, crinoid parts, trilobites, bryozoans.
From Canadian National Geographic:
In 1991, a high school teacher discovered a giant T. rex skeleton while canvassing the badlands near Eastend, Saskatchewan. Nicknamed Scotty, this 13-metre-long, 8,800-kilogram beast is the largest T. rex ever discovered.
Morden, Manitoba holds the Guinness World Record for the largest publicly displayed mosasaur. Bruce, a 13-metre-long, 80-million-year-old marine reptile prowled the inland seas that covered what is now the Canadian prairies.
Canada’s oldest discovered dinosaurs are long-necked Triassic-era plateosaurs found in the Bay of Fundy.
The Age of Dinosaurs Gallery inside the Royal Ontario Museum, features Gordo, the largest real fossil skeleton in the country, and one of only three barosaurus on display in the world.
The Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, Wembley, Alberta, sits adjacent to Pipestone Creek, one of the densest fossil beds anywhere in the world. It is final resting place for thousands of hadrosaur, tyrannosaur, nodosaur, plesiosaur, and pterosaur fossils.
Drumheller’s Royal Tyrrell Museum’s Dinosaur Hall has one of the largest mounted displays of dinosaurs anywhere in the world, including triceratops and T. rex. Also the gorgosaurus and the herd-roaming Edmontosaurus.
On Vancouver Island, in 1988, local fossil enthusiast Mike Trask was exploring a local river when he discovered an 80-million-year-old elasmosaurus, the first of its kind in Canada. Now in The Courtenay Dinosaur Museum.
From Canadian Encylopedia - Dinosaurs Found in Canada
Canada is home to some of the richest deposits of dinosaur fossils in the world. The vast majority of the dinosaurs discovered in Canada are from Alberta, where the rising Rocky Mountains at the end of the Cretaceous period and a network of ancient rivers provided the sediment necessary for burying and preserving their remains.
While fossil birds have been found in Canada, they are not well understood because their fossils are very rare, not well preserved, and generally incomplete.
While dinosaur remains have been discovered in Nova Scotia, Nunavut, the Northwest Territories and Yukon, the fossils from these places are often not complete enough to identify to which species they belonged or have not yet been the subject of detailed scientific study. In the case of Nova Scotia, paleontologists have found fossils of a primitive armoured dinosaur, sometimes called Scutellosaurus, and of a long-necked, planting-eating dinosaur, informally called Fendusaurus eldoni.
Paleontologists can’t say exactly (and with certainty) what dinosaur species made footprints (called an ichnospecies) and eggs (called an oospecies). Many dinosaur footprints have been found in British Columbia and Nova Scotia.
GeoScienceInfo - Paleo-environment of Southwestern Ontario
The rocks and fossils in the Arkona-Kettle Point area of southwestern Ontario were deposited roughly 387 to 372 million years ago, in the Middle to Late Devonian Period.
During the Middle to Late Devonian Period, most of what is now North America was part of a large continent called Laurussia.
The Arkona area was situated just south of the equator during the mid- to late Devonian Period at a similar latitude to modern day Brazil. It had a tropical climate, with little variation in temperature.
Much of east-central North America, including the Arkona area, was a shallow inland sea during this time. There was little mixing of water between the inland sea and the open ocean, being largely surrounded by land, bounded by the main (Laurussian) land mass to the north, the Trans-Continental Arch to the northwest, and the Acadian Mountains to the southeast.
The warm, tropical shallow sea that once occupied southwestern Ontario teemed with tropical marine life. Offshore conditions in these seas were typically calm, promoting the establishment of underwater “meadows” of crinoids. Although these creatures, commonly called “sea lilies”, superficially looked like plants, they were indeed animals that lived attached to the seafloor, filtering small food particles out of the water. Various species of shelled animals called brachiopods also lived in large numbers on the seafloor filtering food out of the water.
Above the seafloor, the water column would have also been a busy place. Squid-like cephalopods with chambered buoyant shells (e.g., nautiloids), and fish would have swum near the bottom, preying on smaller organisms.
Corals were both abundant and diverse in the warm, shallow sea. In some cases, forming reef-like buildups (as seen in the Amherstberg Formation) or more sheet-like bodies called biostromes (as represented in the coral unit of the Hungry Hollow Member of the Widder Formation).