New Dinosaur Found in Alaska

Samples of frozen bone were uncovered at the Liscomb Bone Bed in the Prince Creek Formation in northern Alaska. The researchers already have evidence of at least 13 species of dinosaurs taking up permanent residence in this inhospitable place, and they expect to find even more – including a few unknown species.

Gregory Erickson of the Biological Science department of Florida State University speaks in a video, courtesy of University of Alaska Fairbanks, about the region they’ve chosen to explore as well as Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis.

“It tells us something right there about the biology of these dinosaurs”, Erickson said, an indication they were more like birds and mammals.

The Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis (ancient grazer) fossils were discovered in the Liscomb Bone Bed layer along the Colville River in the Prince Creek Formation, which was deposited by glacial flooding.

The new creature looked very similar to Edmontosaurus, another duck-billed dino often found in Montana and Alberta, Canada. Then they have to come in on tiny bush planes and take inflatable boats down rivers plagued by crumbling cliffs.

Researchers have been debating whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded, cold-blooded or maybe something in between for many years now.

“What we’re finding is basically this lost world of dinosaurs with many new forms completely new to science”, Erickson, who is originally from Alaska, said.

If you’re wondering how dinosaurs managed to survive in the Arctic temperatures we know today, the answer is, they didn’t.

The researchers think the community of dinosaurs did not migrate south during these long dark stretches, so they would have needed to know how to move around in the dark and find food at a time when plants were scarce.

This hadrosaur had a duck-billed head and hundreds of teeth used for grinding coarse vegetation.

How dinosaurs survived the Alaskan chill isn’t the only question scientists have – there’s also the matter of darkness. According to the researchers it was one of more than a dozen of species of dinosaurs that lived in the northern part. The scientific paper describing Ugrunaaluk was published online on September 22 in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica and is freely available here.

Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis’s ability to be robustly dominant in the Prince Creek Formation suggests to researchers that these dinosaurs must have been able to adapt to the cold in some way.

Andrew McDonald, PhD is a vertebrate paleontologist and writer. “Down the road, I think you are going to see some intriguing discoveries about the biology of dinosaurs”. Since the 1960s, scientists have excavated 6,000 bones from the new species, primarily belonging to individuals about 9 feet in length. In this particular area, most of the skeletons were from younger or juvenile dinosaurs, about 9 feet long and 3 feet tall at the hip. “So far, there is no overlap at all between dinosaurs in these two sites”. The researchers believe that it’s possible that a herd of juveniles was killed suddenly to create this deposit of remains.