New Discovery Shows Baby Dinosaurs Once Hatched in the Arctic

The Prince Creek Formation in northern Alaska, where the fossils were found, is “the furthest north the dinosaurs have ever seen”, according to researcher Gregory Erickson, a paleobiologist at Florida State University.

“I don’t think it’s possible for them to stay further north,” he said. “Because what is now called Alaska shifted closer to the North Pole than it is now. It was up there with Santa Claus.”

After analyzing the baby’s teeth and bones, the research team determined that the remains belonged to seven different dinosaur species.

Erickson went on to explain that this discovery suggests that the dinosaurs most likely lived in this cold region year round, as the babies would have been too small for the annual migration shortly after they hatched.

Researchers have known that dinosaurs lived in the polar regions since oil workers discovered dinosaur bones there in the 1950s. In the next decade, scientists with the University of Alaska Northern Museum discovered the remains of a very small baby dinosaur in the state.

“Our work is like panning for gold, finding tiny bones in a sea of ​​sediment,” said study co-author Patrick Druckenmiller, a professor of geosciences and director of the University of Alaska Northern Museums.

Undergraduate and graduate students have contributed thousands of hours of work to the project, which found baby donsaurs belonging to several herbivorous species of short-billed dinosaurs, horned dinosaurs, scelosaurids, and dome-headed dinosaurs.

They also found the remains of baby carnivores including tyrannosaurs, deinonychosaurs, and ornithomimosaurians.

“The latest surprise was the smallest ceratopsid tooth I know of in North America, or anywhere else actually,” Druckenmiller said.

Erickson also said the winter months in Alaska’s Arctic at that time may be the most difficult times — especially for herbivores — whose diets are covered in snow or even killed by the weather.

“How they did it, we don’t know,” Erickson said.

Some of the smaller dinosaurs might have burrowed to hibernate, but for the larger dinosaurs, Erikson said, it may have been their way of surviving similar to that of elk or musk oxen.

“Somehow, they made it through.”

Reporter: Paquita Gadin

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