New species of dinosaur discovered in Alaska

According to Mark Norell, curator of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, although it was highly possible that there were dinosaurs who lived in the high Arctic like caribou and musk oxen, it was hard to imagine how small and juvenile dinosaurs were physically capable of surviving long-distance seasonal migration. “How did they survive up here?”

The researchers have theories of the dinosaur spending all of winter in total darkness due t the temperatures dropping to two degrees Celsius.

It is the fourth dinosaur to be found in northern Alaska, but this species has forced scientists to reconsider some of the assumptions that have been made concerning dinosaur physiology and the types of habitats they could thrive in. “It took 20 years before anyone actually realized the bones were from a dinosaur”, says Patrick Druckenmiller, a paleontologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

From here, the researchers will continue to dig in the fossil rich Prince Creek Formation, exploring fossil specimens from the 13 different dinosaur species they have estimated are buried in sediments there.

For at least 25 years, the fossils were lumped in with another hadrosaur, Edmontosaurus, a species well-known in Canada and the us, including Montana and South Dakota.

Fans of the “Lost World” and everything related to dinosaurs are in for a treat as scientists unearth a fossil of a duck-billed dinosaur in Alaska.

“It was probably comparable to what you would find in Juneau, Alaska, down in the panhandle of the state”, Druckenmiller said. “We have multiple elements of every single bone in the body”, he said, adding that the discovery “provides further evidence that the dinosaurs living in polar latitudes in what is now Alaska were not the same species found from the same time periods in lower latitudes”. Researchers believe that the dinosaur grew up to 30 feet long from nose to tail, and it had hundreds of teeth, which helped it chew tough vegetation. Druckenmiller believes that the bones belonged to a herd of young hadrosaurs that had been wiped out suddenly and unexpectedly.

“What we’re finding is basically this lost world of dinosaurs with many new forms completely new to science”, FSU Professor of Biological Science Gregory Erickson said in a statement. The detailed findings of Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis were published Tuesday in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica. What this means is that the new species of dinosaurs could be found as far north as they had land to walk on.