A new species of dinosaur has been discovered in Alaska- the Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis (oo-GROO’-nah-luk KOOK’-pik-en-sis). The dinosaur lived in darkness for months and probably experienced snow, researchers said.
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A new species of dinosaur said to be about 30 feet in length, with a frontal duck-billed nose has been discovered in Northern Alaska and supports growing evidence that dinosaurs were capable of surving in cold climates. Assuming they belonged to large Ice Age mammals, he made no further effort to study them.
“It was probably comparable to what you would find in Juneau, Alaska, down in the panhandle of the state”, Patrick Druckenmiller, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, told The Los Angeles Times, “It wasn’t a warm winter, but it was much warmer than it is today”. The findings were published Tuesday in “Acta Palaeontologica Polonica”, an worldwide paleontology quarterly journal.
Field experts dubbed the newly discovered, plant eating dinosaur “Ugrunaaluk Kuukpikensis”, which translates to “ancient grazer”.
“Ugrunaaluk is far and away the most complete dinosaur yet found in the Arctic or any polar region”. Druckenmiller speculates that a herd of them was wiped out in a sudden and catastrophic event some 69 million years ago. Axel Heiberg Island may be further north now, but that is only because the continent has rotated counter-clockwise due to the shifting and jostling of plate tectonics.
“The image of tyrannosaurs, horned dinosaurs, and hadrosaurs walking through the cool forests of ancient Alaska has run so counter to the classic Mesozoic imagery that it’s not surprising that this environment has been the subject of several recent documentaries and even a feature film”, he added. Instead of treeless tundra, the North Slope was covered with deciduous conifers, as well as broadleaf shrubs, ferns and horsetails. As Druckenmiller points out, though, “it still would have been a really tough existence”.
The Washington Post reports that while the area was warmer than it is today, it was still quite cold with an average annual temperature in the lower 40s. “Moose get pretty skinny up here by the time spring rolls around”, he says, “but a lot of them make it”.
The skeletal remains of the newest dinosaur, named Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis, were found in a remote part of Alaska believed to the northernmost dinosaurs were known to have ever lived, according to an FSU statement. “That poses a mystery there, how did they survive the conditions up there?”
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“The finding of dinosaurs this far north challenges everything we thought about a dinosaur’s physiology”, said Erickson.
