Arctic dinosaurs and winters


This video is called Arctic Dinosaurs – Documentary.

From LiveScience:

Polar dinosaurs such as the 4.4-ton duckbill Edmontosaurus are thought by some paleontologists to have been champion migrators to avoid the cold, dark season. But a study now claims that most of these beasts preferred to stick closer to home despite potentially deadly winter weather.

While some polar dinosaurs may have migrated, their treks were much shorter than previously thought, University of Alberta researchers Phil Bell and Eric Snively conclude from a recent review of past research on the animals and their habitat. Polar dinosaurs include hadrosaurs, ceratopsians, tyrannosaurs, troodontids, hypsilophodontids, ankylosaurs, prosauropods, sauropods, ornithomimids and oviraptorosaurs.

See also Dinosaurs of the North Pole.

8 thoughts on “Arctic dinosaurs and winters

  1. Dinosaurs Lived in the Arctic
    LiveScience.com

    Natural History Magazine
    LiveScience.com stephan Reebs

    livescience.com – Sat Apr 25, 11:56 am ET

    You know the scenario: 65 million years ago, a big meteor crash sets off volcanoes galore, dust and smoke fill the air, dinosaurs go belly up.

    One theory holds that cold, brought on by the Sun’s concealment, is what did them in, but a team of paleontologists led by Pascal Godefroit, of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, argues otherwise. Some dinosaurs (warm-blooded, perhaps) were surprisingly good at withstanding near-freezing temperatures, they say.

    Witness the team’s latest find, a diverse stash of dinosaur fossils laid down just a few million years before the big impact, along what’s now the Kakanaut River of northeastern Russia. Even accounting for continental drift, the dinos lived at more than 70 degrees of latitude north, well above the Arctic Circle.

    And they weren’t lost wanderers, either. The fossils include dinosaur eggshells – a first at high latitudes, and evidence of a settled, breeding population.

    It’s true the Arctic was much warmer back then, but it wasn’t any picnic. The size and shape of fossilized leaves found with the bones enabled Godefroit’s team to estimate a mean annual temperature of 50 degrees Fahrenheit, with wintertime lows at freezing.

    Yet there is more than one way to skin a dino. All that dust in the atmosphere must have curtailed photosynthesis everywhere, weakening the base of the food chain and inflicting starvation, and finally extinction, upon the dinosaurs.

    The research was detailed in the journal Naturwissenschaften.

    Like

  2. Pingback: Darwin, first writings on dinosaurs, online | Dear Kitty. Some blog

  3. Pingback: Valdosaurus dinosaur, well-preserved fossil found in England | Dear Kitty. Some blog

  4. Pingback: Dinosaur age diving bird discovery in Japan | Dear Kitty. Some blog

  5. Pingback: Marsupial lived among Alaskan dinosaurs | Dear Kitty. Some blog

  6. Pingback: Duck-billed dinosaur discovery in Alaska | Dear Kitty. Some blog

  7. Pingback: Many dinosaur footprints discovered in Alaska | Dear Kitty. Some blog

  8. Pingback: How dinosaurs survived Arctic cold | Dear Kitty. Some blog

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.