In this paper, the dynamic analysis of a dolphin system for mooring a floating structure such as barge mounted plant is studied. The characteristics of the soil-pile system are simplified by a set of equivalent spring elements at the mudline. To evaluate the equivalent spring constants, the finite difference method is used. Since the characteristics of the soil-pile system are nonlinear in case of soft foundation, the nonlinear dynamic analysis technique is needed. The Newmark $beta$ method incorporating the modified Newton-Raphson method(initial stiffness method) is used. A numerical analysis is performed on two mooring dolphin systems on soft foundation and rock foundation. In case of the rock foundation, the characteristics are found to be nearly linear, so the linear dynamic analysis may be sufficient to consider the foundation effect. But in case of soft foundation, the non-linearity of the foundation appears to be very signigicant, so the nonlinear dynamic analysis si needed.