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 ...
They might be fierce, but they’d run in terror from fruitcake.
There’s no single answer to the warm/cold blooded question, and thanks to the march of knowledge, there’s not even two answers anymore. Robert Bakker spearheaded a push for hot-blooded-ness in the dinos, but in nearly 50 years since it isn’t the dominant paradigm. As evidence has accumulated that has been interpreted to mean that the dinos are ancestral to chickens and other birds, the old dichotomy of hot vs cold among critters in general has broken down.
Dinosaur footprint found in Alaska national park
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1437383/posts
Ocean hot in days of dinosaurs, study finds
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1581106/posts
Haughton Astrobleme: A Mid-Cenozoic Impact Crater Devon Island, Canadian Arctic Archipelago [39 million years ago]
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/237210205_Haughton_Astrobleme_A_Mid-Cenozoic_Impact_Crater_Devon_Island_Canadian_Arctic_Archipelago
Uh, yeah. "Hey Drill, the thing that's about to eat you is only 25 feet long. You should be grateful it isn't 40 feet long!" I gotta get another lawyer.
Totally warm-blooded. I mean check out the goosebumps on that thing!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.