How did they endure months of perpetual cold and dark?
- By Mitch Leslie
- Smithsonian magazine
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| Not just
warm-weather creatures, dinosaurs (hypsilophodonts), in fact, survived
icy winters in southeastern Australia 100 million years ago, when the
continent was close to the South Pole. (Peter Trusler)
|
Think "dinosaurs" and you probably conjure up behemoths trudging through sweltering swamps or torrid tropical forests. But ... scientists working in Australia, Alaska and even atop a mountain in Antarctica have unearthed remains of dinosaurs that prospered in environments that were cold for at least part of the year. Polar dinosaurs, as they are known, also had to endure prolonged darkness—up to six months each winter. "The moon would be out more than the sun, and it would be tough making a living," says paleontologist David Weishampel of Johns Hopkins University.
The evidence that dinosaurs braved the cold—and maybe scrunched through snow and slid on ice—challenges what scientists know about how the animals survived. ... paleontologists are filling in the picture of how these animals lived and what their environments were like. Recent research might also shed light on two of the most disputed questions in paleontology: Were dinosaurs warmblooded? And what killed them off?
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