Paleontologists have found dinosaur remains in Alaska

Paleontologists from the United States found in the territory of Alaska in the vicinity of the Colville River an unusual Northern dinosaur from the number of hadrosaurs, who lived in a very cool climate and probably was a warm-blooded creature that survived freezing temperatures without migrating south.

“The discovery of a duck-billed dinosaur this far north challenges everything we believed about the physiology of these dinosaurs. It poses a simple and natural question to us: how did they survive in such a climate?” - said Greg Erickson from Florida State University in Tallahassee (USA).

Erickson and his colleagues have been excavating the northern regions of Alaska for several years, where in recent years they have managed to find the remains of about twelve or thirteen dinosaurs, none of which could be classified as separate species due to the small amount of fossils or their strong fragmentation .

This time, the scientists smiled luck - they managed to find almost complete skeletons of a whole herd of large duck-billed dinosaurs during excavations in a place called Liscombe, located next to the Colville River.

The new species of hadrosaurs was named Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis, which means “Colville River Grazing Dinosaur” in the Inupik Eskimo language. Judging by the findings of Erickson and his colleagues, the “ugrunaaluks” they found were quite young individuals, reaching on average only a meter in height and about three meters in length. Scientists believe that adults could reach lengths of up to an impressive ten meters.

Judging by its anatomy, Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis was a close relative of its southern Edmontozavram cousins, who have a slightly different shape of the skull and jaws. They lived much further south, in the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, and had a fancy ridge, which Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis did not appear to have.

Alaska at the time, as explained by paleontologists, was located much to the north than today, being far beyond the Arctic Circle and approaching the eightieth degree of latitude. Therefore, in spite of the warmer and milder climate of the Cretaceous period, snow had to fall on its territory and negative temperatures were observed in winter.

The fact that scientists could not find the remains of turtles, crocodiles and other cold-blooded and thermophilic reptiles is another evidence that dinosaurs could be warm-blooded and more reminiscent of the behavior and metabolism of birds and mammals than of reptiles.

In the near future, scientists will continue excavations in the hope of finding new remains of “ugrunaaluks” and other, as yet unknown, species of dinosaurs.