Scientists have discovered a new species of duck-billed dinosaur that walked the North Slope of Alaska about 69 million years ago.
The 30-foot-long duck-billed dinosaurs, or hadrosaurs, survived in herds and most likely spent months at a time living in darkness, the University of Alaska Fairbanks, reported.
"Today we find these animals in polar latitudes," said Earth sciences curator Pat Druckenmiller. "Amazingly, they lived even farther north during the Cretaceous Period. These were the northern-most dinosaurs to have lived during the Age of Dinosaurs. They were truly polar."
The Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis (ancient grazer) fossils were discovered in the Liscomb Bone Bed layer along the Colville River in the Prince Creek Formation, which was deposited by glacial flooding. The bones were first uncovered by geologist Robert Liscomb, who stumbled upon them while mapping along the Colville River for Shell Oil Company in 1961. The bones had not been recognized as belonging to an unknown species until now. Since the 1960s, scientists have excavated 6,000 bones from the new species, primarily belonging to individuals about 9 feet in length.
"It appears that a herd of young animals was killed suddenly, wiping out mostly one similar-aged population to create this deposit," Druckenmiller said.
Only three other dinosaur species have been identified in the North Slope, including two herbivore and one carnivore, but none of these species have offered up a complete skeleton.
"Ugrunaaluk is far and away the most complete dinosaur yet found in the Arctic or any polar region. We have multiple elements of every single bone in the body. So far, all dinosaurs from the Prince Creek Formation that we can identify as species are distinct from those found anywhere else. The recognition of Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis provides further evidence that the dinosaurs living in polar latitudes in what is now Alaska were not the same species found from the same time periods in lower latitudes," Druckenmiller said.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica.
