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Researchers have discovered a memory cache of 100 million - year - old dinosaur cartroad and other fossil embedded in the foothills of an Alaskan flock range .
The fossil site , in the Nanushuk Formation beneath the De Long Mountains , provide a windowpane into a flourishing Cretaceous ecosystem populated with dinosaurs of all sizes , according to a University of Alaska Fairbanksstatementreleased March 8 .
Dinosaur footprints dating back 100 million years have been discovered at the foothills of the De Long Mountains in Alaska.
Paleontologists examined the site between 2015 and 2017 . They found 75 dinosaur rail pull up stakes by meat and industrial plant - eat dinosaur , though they did n’t identify specific species .
" This place was just crazy rich with dinosaur footprints , " leave authorAnthony Fiorillo , executive theater director of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science , said in the argument .
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A theropod track (left) and a fossilized tree trunk (right) discovered at the Nanushuk Formation in Alaska.
Fiorillo and his fellow worker discovered the website was a preserve ancient landscape , with fossils of 2 - foot - wide ( 60 centimetre ) tree diagram stumps , leaf , tracks and dejection .
" It was just like we were walking through the woods of millions of years ago , " he say .
The researcher present their finding in a survey publish Jan. 30 in the journalGeosciences .
The Nanushuk Formation is around 94 million to 113 million years old and go steady to the Albian - Cenomanian Age of theCretaceous period(145 million to 66 million years ago ) , grant to the statement .
A majority of the cut ( 59 % ) were left by two - legged herbivorous dinosaurs , conjointly calledbipedal ornithischians . This radical include brute such ashelmet - headedpachycephalosaurs , which were not identified in the subject area . Four - legged works eaters , or quadrupedal ornithischians , made up 17 % of the tracks . Some of those belong to ceratopsians , a mathematical group that includes the three - hornedTriceratops .
The ecosystem also hosted meat - use up dinosaurs , with 9 % of the tracks left by mostly carnivorous , nonavian theropod dinosaur . The source note that some of these tracks were within the size of it range of Turonian theropods such asSuskityrannus , a 3 - animal foot - tall ( 1 meter ) tyrannosaurus nicknamed " mini rex , " andTimurlengia , which was about the size of a sawhorse .
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Shorebirds leave the final 15 % of discover tracks . Almost half of North America ’s bread and butter shorebirds breed in the Arctic during the region ’s warm calendar month , and the authors noted that the high frequency of nonextant shorebird track here suggested the same thing pass in the Cretaceous .
The squad also used the formation to learn more about the ancient Arctic ’s warm and wet clime . By count on the meanspirited one-year hurriedness from wood fragments , they found that the Arctic dinosaurs live in a climate similar to that of innovative - day South Florida .
" The temperature was much lovesome than it is today , and what ’s possibly more interesting is that it rained a lot , " Fiorillo say . " The sample we take apart indicate it was roughly tantamount to mod - day Miami . That ’s middling substantial . "
