Dinosaurs on the North Slope, Alaska: High Latitude, Latest Cretaceous Environments
- 25 September 1987
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Science
- Vol. 237 (4822), 1608-1610
- https://doi.org/10.1126/science.237.4822.1608
Abstract
Abundant skeletal remains demonstrate that lambeosaurine hadrosaurid, tyrannosaurid, and troodontid dinosaurs lived on the Alaskan North Slope during late Campanian—early Maestrichtian time (about 66 to 76 million years ago) in a deltaic environment dominated by herbaceous vegetation. The high ground terrestrial plant community was a mild- to cold-temperate forest composed of coniferous and broad leaf trees. The high paleolatitude (about 70° to 85° North) implies extreme seasonal variation in solar insolation, temperature, and herbivore food supply. Great distances of migration to contemporaneous evergreen floras and the presence of both juvenile and adult hadrosaurs suggest that they remained at high latitudes year-round. This challenges the hypothesis that short-term periods of darkness and temperature decrease resulting from a bolide impact caused dinosaurian extinction.This publication has 9 references indexed in Scilit:
- Duck-bill dinosaurs (Hadrosauridae, Ornithischia) from the North Slope of AlaskaJournal of Paleontology, 1987
- North American nonmarine climates and vegetation during the Late CretaceousPalaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 1987
- Toward a theory of impact crisesEos, 1986
- Paleobotanical evidence for cool north polar climates in middle Cretaceous (Albian-Cenomanian) timeGeology, 1986
- An interpretation of Cretaceous and tertiary biota in polar regionsPalaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 1984
- IntroductionPublished by Springer Nature ,1984
- Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary ExtinctionScience, 1980
- Fossil oculata pollen from AlaskaGeoscience and Man, 1976
- Dinosaur RenaissanceScientific American, 1975