Jurassic Parka: Dinosaurs Did Fine In The Russian Arctic

Dinosaurs have often been portrayed as ‘tropical’ animals, sensitive to climatic fluctuations and iving under the warm equable climates of the Mesozoic (see, e.g., Ginsburg 1986). However, recent discoveries of vertebrate assemblages at high latitudes show that dinosaurs could live close to the Mesozoic poles from the Early Jurassic until the Late Cretaceous, under climatic conditions, which, in any case, cannot be considered as tropical (Rich et al. 1997, 2002; Buffetaut 2004). The presence of dinosaurs in polar palaeoenvironments has important implications on the question of dinosaur extinction (Buffetaut 2004). Indeed, climate changes toward colder and/or more contrasted climates around the Cretaceous/Paleocene Boundary have often been put forward as one of the main causes for dinosaur extinction (see, e.g., Sloan 1976; Sloan et al. 1986; Officer et al. 1987; Landis et al. 1996).

In this paper, we describe a Late Maastrichtian (68 to 65 million years ago) dinosaur fauna from Kakanaut in northeastern Russia, which demonstrates that polar dinosaurs were still highly diversified and well adapted to relatively cool climates just before the Cretaceous/Paleocene mass extinction event.

Teeth From the Kakanaut site demonstrate the broad diversity of animals in the area:

Dromaeosaurids, tyrannosaurids, Hadrosaurs, Neoceratopsians. You name it.