Back at the time, many people considered the Mesozoic world a constant tropical hothouse, with little variation on climate. Dinosaurs were portrayed as great lizards that required tropical climates to thrive.
Arctic dinosaurs give one more killing blow to that already pretty old-fashioned concept. They lived in a cold climate well beyond the Arctic circle – and apparently thrived. But what was their world like?
I recently wrote a newspaper article on the newly described Alaskan hadrosaur Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis. For that, I read a bunch of papers about the flora and climate or Cretaceous Arctic. I also contacted paleoclimatologist Carla Tomsich from the University of Alaska, who turned out to be an incredibly helpful and nice person. Here’s what I learned about Ugrunaaluk‘s world.