Dinosaurs stayed and nested in the Arctic

[ITdactyl]

paleoart by James Havens, University of Alaska Fairbanks

As the header states, the cold didn't bother them anyway... badumtsss...

The paper:
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)00739-9?utm_source=EA#secsectitle0010

Easy reading:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2282122-dinosaurs-lived-in-the-arctic-around-70-million-years-ago/

Now they'll have to remake "Walking with Dinosaurs 3d", because the migration plot has just been debunked.

Ok, I'll stop now.

[Neosodon]

I like the picture. If dinosaurs like hadrosaurs were living in the arctic year around they must have had unique adaptations for that. Like how would they keep warm and not starve?

[Halichoeres]

Cool, thanks for sharing. And always lovely to see James Havens art.

[andrewsaurus rex]

hard to  believe all those animals could survive a long dark winter.  The herbivores especially.  With their large size they would need large amounts of vegetation to sustain them.  Even musk ox barely make it through a winter.  And it's hard to fathom how the young dinosaurs would survive, as they wouldn't have the large body mass of the adults to help retain heat.  Perhaps the young burrowed.

At least it explains what Nanuqsaurus ate during the winter.  I always wondered how a large carnivore could survive a winter if all its prey migrated away.

[Newt]

Interesting stuff!

Re: herbivore survival -  this was not the modern tundra. The average annual temperature according to the paper was about 6.3 C, certainly not cold enough for the permafrost that limits vegetation growth in the high Arctic today, and only a little cooler than, say, Vancouver or Minneapolis. Of those, the climate was probably closer to maritime Vancouver (consistently cool with relatively mild summer and winter temperatures, compared to the more extreme conditions in continental Minneapolis), considering the Prince Creek Formation's proximity to the ocean. The PCF ecosystem would have been temperature- and vegetation-wise more similar to today's Pacific Northwest. There would have been plenty of plant biomass available all winter, even if the trees were deciduous.


No doubt the long dark winters still necessitated some unusual behaviors by the inhabitants, but they were no more in danger of winter starvation than the deer in my area.