“Most complete” Arctic dino found; said to have endured nasty conditions

The mattress is known as for geologist Robert Liscomb, who discovered the primary dinosaur bones in Alaska in 1961 whereas mapping for Shell Oil Co. Researchers teased out differences in the Alaska fossils, Druckenmiller said, by plotting growth trajectories and by comparing them with juvenile Edmontosaurus bones. This makes this new species and others like them “the northern-most dinosaurs to have lived during the Age of Dinosaurs”, Pat Druckenmiller, the curator of earth sciences at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said in a statement.

“These were dinosaurs living at the very edge of what we think dinosaurs were physiologically capable of”, he says. The scientists, with the help of speakers of Inupiaq (the language of Alaska Inupiat Eskimos), chose the name.

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.

They have found no evidence of crocodiles, turtles, lizards or other ectotherms, the cold-blooded animals that depend on the sun or another external source of heat to regulate their body temperature.

“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. “It’s intriguing for us to ponder how they survived those months of darkness”, Florida State University professor Greg Erickson explained.

The northern hadrosaurs would have endured months of winter darkness and probably snow. The duck-billed species, dubbed Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis, has bones practically littered in the cold Alaskan landscape, indicating to researchers that it not only survived the cold, 40-degree weather-but thrived. But because temperatures were more temperate than today, the area also was covered with trees.

“And that means that it thrived in an area that was – at least for a dinosaur – remarkably cold”. Druckenmiller and colleagues published their findings in the academic journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica.

Museum scientists have excavated and catalogued more than 6,000 bones from the species, more than any other Alaska dinosaur.

Recognizing these dinosaurs as their own species is crucial for paleontologists, because it suggests that Ugrunaaluk lived in the same place year-round, instead of migrating south in the winter, as was previously expected. “Alaska is unexplored paleontologically”. The formal examine of the Alaska dinosaur revealed variations in cranium and mouth options that made it a distinct species, Druckenmiller mentioned. Majority are estimated to have been about 9 feet long and 3 feet tall, which shows that they were small juveniles.

Researchers discovered this new species of hadrosaur in Alaska.

Visitors to the University of Alaska Museum of the North will be able to view three near-complete skeletons of Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis, which will go on display there soon.

“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.