Sunday, April 26, 2009

Arctic Circle Dino Eggs Found

Witness the team's latest find, a diverse stash of dinosaur fossils laid down just a few million years before the big impact, along what's now the Kakanaut River of northeastern Russia. Even accounting for continental drift, the dinos lived at more than 70 degrees of latitude north, well above the Arctic Circle.

And they weren't lost wanderers, either. The fossils include dinosaur eggshells - a first at high latitudes, and evidence of a settled, breeding population.

It's true the Arctic was much warmer back then, but it wasn't any picnic. The size and shape of fossilized leaves found with the bones enabled Godefroit's team to estimate a mean annual temperature of 50 degrees Fahrenheit, with wintertime lows at freezing.

[...]

The research was detailed in the journal Naturwissenschaften.



argh! Not in a journal I have access to. Probably not in a language I can read in technicalese either.

oy.

"A few million years before the impact..."

Does that make it maastrichtian or campanian?

1 comment:

Zachary Miller said...

I think there are eggshell fragments at Prince Creek, too...