A new type of dinosaur has been found in Alaska’s Colville River

The bones were first uncovered by geologist Robert Liscomb, who stumbled upon them while mapping along the Colville River for Shell Oil Company in 1961.

The plant-eater found in northern Alaska is a type of Hadrosaur – a duck-billed dinosaur which roamed in herds. Along with Patrick Druckenmiller, earth sciences curator of the University of Alaska Museum of the North and associate professor of geology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Erickson has just announced the discovery of a new species of dinosaur found in the area.

“These were dinosaurs living at the very edge of what we think dinosaurs were physiological capable of”, Druckenmiller told the Washington Post.

The dinosaur is named Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis, the Alaskan Inupiaq name for “ancient grazer”.

They will also delve deeper into how these animals lived and functioned in conditions not typically thought to be amenable to occupation by reptilian dinosaurs. During the late Cretaceous period much of Alaska was covered in relatively temperate polar forests that were heavily populated by deciduous trees, which lose their leaves during the winter.

Further evidence came in 1991 when paleontologists discovered Cryolophosaurus ellioti, a previously unknown dinosaur species and the only one found on the continent of Antarctica, the USGS said.

Otherwise, they would not have survived the extreme weather. Dubbed Ugrunaaluk Kuukpikensis, the dinosaur was so far north that it would have lived in darkness for months at a time, and may even have lived in snowy zones.

As the atmosphere during the so-called age of the dinosaurs was filled with more greenhouse gases, the Earth was warmer overall.

The thousands of bones recovered from the Prince Creek Formation more than 300 miles northwest of Fairbanks were from juvenile specimens less than nine feet long.

For now, researchers plan to track growth rates of dinosaur bones to determine if an unusually slow metabolism kept back the cold.

UAF student Hirotsugu Mori completed his doctoral work on the species, and Florida State University paleobiologist Gregory Erickson specialized in the bone and tooth histology and co-published his findings with Mori in the “Acta Palaentologica Polonica” quarterly paleontology journal. Most were small juveniles estimated to have been about 9 feet long and 3 feet tall at the hips.

An artist’s depiction of what paleontologists believe Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis looked like.

“It seems that a herd of younger animals was killed out of the blue, wiping out principally one related-aged inhabitants to create this layer”, Druckenmiller mentioned. The formal study of the Alaska dinosaur, however, revealed differences in skull and mouth features that made it a different species, Druckenmiller said. Erickson and Druckenmiller’s new species shows that the answer may be quite complicated.

At the time that these dinosaurs lived, their region would have averaged temperatures in the low 40s.