Dinosaurs Lived in the Arctic

[seemslikeadream]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/dinosaurslivedinthearctic

You know the scenario: 65 million years ago, a big meteor crash sets off volcanoes galore, dust and smoke fill the air, dinosaurs go belly up.


One theory holds that cold, brought on by the Sun's concealment, is what did them in, but a team of paleontologists led by Pascal Godefroit, of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, argues otherwise. Some dinosaurs (warm-blooded, perhaps) were surprisingly good at withstanding near-freezing temperatures, they say.


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.

[walkaway]

1. Sarah Palin's great great great grandfather could see them from his house. n/t

[Warpy]

2. There's also a lack of dino skeletons clustered at the k-t boundary

so current thinking is that something had them in decline for many centuries before the meteor finished the last ones off. It could have been climate change, habitat degradation, or a massive pandemic of something they were all vulnerable to.

They've already discovered that some were warm blooded, that others had feathers. They're not the lizards we grew up with in our grammar school science textbooks.

[seemslikeadream]

5. Did you see this on k-t

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090427010803.htm


New Blow Against Dinosaur-killing Asteroid Theory, Geologists Find


....


When spherules from the impact were found just below the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary, it was quickly identified as the "smoking gun" responsible for the mass extinction event that took place 65 million years ago.

It was this event which saw the demise of dinosaurs, along with countless other plant and animal species.

However, a number of scientists have since disagreed with this interpretation.

The newest research, led by Gerta Keller of Princeton University in New Jersey, and Thierry Adatte of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, uses evidence from Mexico to suggest that the Chicxulub impact predates the K-T boundary by as much as 300,000 years.

"Keller and colleagues continue to amass detailed stratigraphic information supporting new thinking about the Chicxulub impact, and the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous," says H. Richard Lane, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research. "The two may not be linked after all."

From El Penon and other localities in Mexico, says Keller, "we know that between four and nine meters of sediments were deposited at about two to three centimeters per thousand years after the impact. The mass extinction level can be seen in the sediments above this interval."

[cpompilo]

3. ummm, tastes like chicken n/t

[xchrom]

4. recommend

[Sandrine for you]

6. I think they got it from the rats, the one of this time, because they are not, at this time,

efficient mamifère to kill all that pest. No cat at this time, and no dog too. But kinds of rats, yes. Poor them, a life without cats...