Researchers declared it to be a 30-feet long herbivorous dinosaur after a thorough investigation of the bones at the Coville River in northern Alaska known as the Prince Creek Formation.
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“We all know that there is at the least 12 to thirteen distinct species of dinosaurs on the North Slope in northern Alaska”, he stated.
The animal was quite a lot of hadrosaur, a duck-billed dinosaur that roamed in herds, mentioned Pat Druckenmiller, earth sciences curator on the College of Alaska Museum in Fairbanks.
“If you have a whole bunch of bones – which we do – you can create a growth curve and find out whether they were doing the same thing as dinosaurs at lower latitudes or growing slower because of the harsh environment”, Druckenmiller said.
Scientists think they’ve found a new species of plant eating dinosaur in Alaska. “These were dinosaurs living at the very edge of what we think dinosaurs were physiologically capable of”. Then they have to come in on tiny bush planes and take inflatable boats down rivers plagued by crumbling cliffs.
We’ve only recently started coming to terms with the idea that dinosaurs weren’t the cold-blooded lizards we imagined.
Researchers have found other dinosaur fossils in Alaska, including track marks belonging to other duck-billed dinosaurs – as well as footprints from ceratopsians (a group of herbivorous, beaked dinosaurs that includes triceratops), therizinosaurs (bipedal herbivores) and flying reptiles known as pterosaurs – in Denali National Park.
The next step in the research programme will be to try to figure out how they survived. They could live in darkness for months and probably saw snow.
How dinosaurs survived the Alaskan chill isn’t the only question scientists have – there’s also the matter of darkness.
“So far, all dinosaurs from the Prince Creek Formation that we can identify as species are distinct from those found anywhere else”.
The researchers plan to look for more fossils at the Prince Creek Formation, but the site is hard to reach.
The findings were published on Tuesday in Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, an global palaeontology quarterly journal. Most were from juveniles estimated to have been about 9 feet long and 3 feet tall at the hips. The researchers believe that it’s possible that a herd of juveniles was killed suddenly to create this deposit of remains.
The new species would have grown to around 30 feet long and were active around 69 million years ago.
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.
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While paleontology is done in warm climates today, some of the most interesting dinosaur bones reside northward, in the Arctic. “Alaska is unexplored paleontologically”. “So far, there is no overlap at all between dinosaurs in these two sites”. Erickson and Druckenmiller’s new species shows that the answer may be quite complicated.
