N. hoglundi was about 25 feet from teeth to tail. [Karen Carr]
Posted on 12/26/2014 7:25:45 AM PST by SunkenCiv
Nanuqsaurus hoglundi was the big little dinosaur find that nearly got left behind.
Classified in a March study, the hobbit T. rex, barely two-thirds the size of its more famous relative, roamed the Arctic some 70 million years ago. It's the only tyrannosaur ever found outside temperate latitudes, rewriting our understanding of the animals' diversity...
In 2006, Fiorillo's team was above the Arctic Circle, on Alaska's North Slope. The polar season for fieldwork is brief, and they were busy excavating horned dinosaurs. But they also noticed a few interesting-looking, basketball-size rocks lying around the site. Fiorillo set them aside, thinking he would take them if the helicopter had room. It did.
Paleontologist Ron Tykoski looked at the rocks when they arrived at the Perot a few months later with 11,000 pounds of other material from the Alaskan dig. "I realized, hey, that's a skull with sharp, pointy teeth. That's a predator," says Tykoski.
But he was focused on the 4-ton horned dinosaur Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum. After a cursory examination, he decided the predator was probably closely related to Albertosaurus, a bipedal carnivore, and he set the rocks aside...
The team took another look at those basketball-size rocks. The teeth found in the rocks were consistent with those that had once sunk into P. perotorum. Inspecting the fragments of skull, jaw and teeth more closely, they realized they had a tyrant on their hands.
Although short stuff compared with T. rex, N. hoglundi was still formidable, about 25 feet from teeth to tail. Its shrunken size may have been an adaptation to survive the long polar winter, when months of near or total darkness meant limited hunting opportunities.
(Excerpt) Read more at discovermagazine.com ...
N. hoglundi was about 25 feet from teeth to tail. [Karen Carr]
*LIKE*
Those arms and hands are almost human looking....kinda creepy.
When global cooling was wiping out the dinosaurs, strangely enough, parts of Alaska remained a warmer refuge far later than most northern latitudes.
The faithful butler for Batmanosaurus and the more diminutive Robinosaurus...
OK, a serious question, demonstrating how long it has been for me since high school paleozoology. The presumption back in my day was that dinosaurs were cold-blooded, like their present-day descendants the gators and crocs. OT1H, a cold-blooded dinosaur in the Arctic would never get anywhere, but OTOH, a 25-foot-long warm-blooded carnivorous dinosaur in the Arctic would require more meat than would reasonably be available...
70 million years ago where was that part of Alaska on our globe?
That would be a Tyrannosaurus Wrecks.
Not sure, but while I was in the Army in Fairbanks, the University of Alaska (Fairbanks) Archeology excavated Wooly Mammoth carcass and Flesh from permafrost that became exposed from a new highway cut.
#5 Only if you do not trim your nails!!
Didn’t know they found one intact. Here all along I thought those were “artists renditions” drawn from 5 or 6 stone/bones fragments.
0.6666 T rex is not exactly pint size
Hang on, I think I have a globe from back when I was growing up.
Where’s a tectonic plate geologist when you need one?
Anytime I am faced with a Global Warming alarmist, I pose the question, “All that oil up in Alaska... how do you figure it got there?”
A ferocious predator, sure—but they couldn’t pass a bowl of candied yams.
Heh...heh... there’s work from, well, quite a long time ago now, from around the Haughton Astrobleme — when the asteroid hit the climate was temperate, at least, and it didn’t get that way through drifting continents.
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