Paleontologists (scientists who study ancient life) do find dinosaurs all over the world. In fact, they have been found on every major continent, including Antarctica, Australia, India, and in the far north of Canada. Dinosaur fossils are even known from Madagascar, Japan, and Greenland! One of the reasons they are so widely distributed is that they evolved during the Late Triassic Period (beginning about 230 million years ago) when the continents we recognize today were still connected to each other.

Early dinosaurs really spread out over the entire large continent known as "Gondwana". During the Jurassic Period (from about 200-145 million years ago), Gondwana started to break up into separate smaller continents. As those continents moved away from one another, they carried the early dinosaur ancestors with them. Over time those dinosaurs gave rise to many different kinds of dinosaurs-- Voila! Dinosaur fossils all over the world!

Interestingly, fossils can tell us a lot about paleogeography (ancient geography). Paleontologists haven't found even one marine dinosaur- NOT ONE! Animals like Mosasaurus were marine lizards, not dinosaurs. The absence of dinosaur fossils in marine sediments is good evidence that dinosaurs were strictly land-dwellers. Paleontologists haven't found any fish- or dolphin-shaped dinosaurs with fins or paddles either; they just didn't have the right equipment to swim across large bodies of water.

The worldwide distribution of those land-bound dinosaurs on continents that are now widely separated by oceans provides evidence that the continents were once together. Cool! There are lots of fossil dinosaur eggs from many different places. Based on what you now know about how widespread dinosaurs were, this probably isn't too surprising. Almost 50 egg species, or "oospecies", are known mostly from central Asia (China, Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, eastern Kazakhstan, and eastern Uzbekistan), southern Europe, India, South America (Brazil, Argentina), North America (Canada and United States), and South Africa. Many of these are found in sediments of Cretaceous age (deposited from about 145-65 million years ago). There are also earlier dinosaur eggs from several places in North America, including Mexico.

For dinosaurs and their relatives there are six basic eggshell types based on combinations of things like surface ornamentation, egg shape, eggshell thickness, etc. Of these six eggshell types, turtles, geckos, and crocodiles have three specific types of eggshell; the other three eggshell types characterize three dinosaur groups, one of which includes birds. So technically, while most dinosaur eggshells are many millions of years old, if you take birds into account you could find dinosaur eggshells in your backyard!