Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis fossilized remains have so far been recovered from sites along the Colville River, especially from a geological formation located in northern Alaska and dubbed the Prince Creed Formation, the paleontologists detail. However, they probably experience snow and lived in darkness for months.
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Researchers initially believed the fossils were of Edmontosaurus, another hadrosaur species well-known in the US and Canada. The formal investigation of the Alaska dinosaur uncovered contrasts in skull and mouth includes that made it an alternate animal categories, Druckenmiller said.
“The types of dinosaur we’re finding are all unique to Alaska”, said Patrick Druckenmiller, an Earth Sciences curator at the University of Alaska Museum of the North and author of the paper, in a interview with The Christian Science Monitor. But the abundant bones, which the researchers believe are gathered in one place because a herd of young dinosaurs were attacked, showed enough small differences to make them suspicious.
The hadrosaurus, also know as duckbills, has been found in 1961 in the Prince Creek Formation area in Alaska, but researchers have only now assigned it to a distinct species. At 25 feet long, the plant eater looked very similar to Edmontosaurus, a duck-billed dinosaur frequently found in Alberta and Montana.
With the help of the speakers of Inupiaq, language of Alaska Inupiat Eskimos, research workers have named the creature Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis ( oo-GROO’-nah-luk KOOK’-pik-en-sis ). Researchers say temperatures weren’t as cold in the Alaskan Arctic back then, with a mean annual temperature in the 40s, but dinosaurs still had to endure long, dark winters with snow and little food.
According to Druckenmiller, while the remains were found in the modern-day polar latitudes, the Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis would have lived even further north during the Cretaceous period – in fact, he added, they were likely “the northern-most dinosaurs to have lived” during this era. The findings were published Tuesday in “Acta Palaeontologica Polonica”, an worldwide paleontology quarterly journal. The location was even further north when Ugrunaaluk herds grazed there, Druckenmiller said.
University of Alaska Fairbanks graduate student Hirotsugu Mori over five years completed his doctoral work on the species.
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.
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“When we think of dinosaurs, we think of them living in a tropical paradise, but for these dinosaurs, it was more like an Arctic paradise”.
