Dinosaur fossil found above Artic Circle

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MGC
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Dinosaur fossil found above Artic Circle

#1 Postby MGC » Tue Oct 19, 2004 7:00 pm

This in todays Times-Picayune:

Researchers have found the remains of a large meat-eating dinosaur on a bleak mountainside on an island off the north coast of Canada, the first dinosaur fossiles discovered above the Artic Circle. Paleontologist Has Larsson, of McGill University's Redpath Museum, described the foot bones and teeth found on Bylot Island as those of a large "tyrannosaurus," a group that includes Tyrannosaurus Rex. Larsson said the fossil was about 75 million years old, embedded in ston, a set of rocky pinnacles that rose out ot the sea just north of Baffin Island, nearly 400 miles north of the Arctic Circle. He said he has unearthed evidence of extensive vegetation, as well as shart teeth and the remains of giant predatory sean animals known as mososaurs.

Either the Earth was warmer or an extreem example of continental drift.....BTW, I'm off to the Florida Keys next week, an island chain that untill a few thousand years ago was underwater. Gee, wonder what made sea level fall? Could it be that the Earth cooled and all that water was trapped in the Artic regions? Just more evidence that Man induced gobal warming is part of a left wing anti-American agenda.......MGC
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#2 Postby HURAKAN » Tue Oct 19, 2004 8:25 pm

Even though the dinosaur was a meat eater, maybe it liked to remain in shape, thus only ate marine food! If life was abundant over the Arctic Circle, this makes me belive that the Poles were either very small, or totally non-existant. Also, most of Earth must have been flooded, probably 85 - 90% underwater, or even more. Very interesting, thanks. I like always to learn about dinosaurs, they were very interesting and diverse creatures.
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#3 Postby HURAKAN » Tue Oct 19, 2004 8:29 pm

Also, since reptiles are cold blooded, this says that the temperatures were the dinosaur lived must have been quite warm to support its life. Cold-blooded animals must have a hard time living in cold conditions.
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#4 Postby frankthetank » Tue Oct 19, 2004 9:37 pm

I also am quite amazed with past climate. I've read books on the ice cores from Greenland and other places and am amazed at how much of the Earths past was brutally cold! After watching "Day After Tomorrow", it makes a person think about when/how the next ice age will come about. Very scary thought, but I guess a person should be more worried about getting killed on the way to work!

side note: I know its just a movie, has obvious flaws, and an unknown cast (ok dennis quaid is a megastar).

I've read several remarks that make the assumption that heat, not cold killed off the dinosaurs.
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#5 Postby Derecho » Tue Oct 19, 2004 9:39 pm

1) The Islands north of Canada were significantly further south in the Cretaceous period.


2) It's believed some dinosaurs may have been warm-blooded.
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#6 Postby HURAKAN » Tue Oct 19, 2004 9:43 pm

frankthetank wrote:I also am quite amazed with past climate. I've read books on the ice cores from Greenland and other places and am amazed at how much of the Earths past was brutally cold! After watching "Day After Tomorrow", it makes a person think about when/how the next ice age will come about. Very scary thought, but I guess a person should be more worried about getting killed on the way to work!

side note: I know its just a movie, has obvious flaws, and an unknown cast (ok dennis quaid is a megastar).

I've read several remarks that make the assumption that heat, not cold killed off the dinosaurs.


Interesting, I also read that during an Ice Age, there are periods of unusual warm weather, which makes me think about the possibility that since the last Ice Age was 10,000 years ago, we could be in the middle of an unusual period of warm weather, and the Ice Age may have not ended. Is controversial since we don't have enough proves to justify all these arguments and hypothesis. No one has lived through an Ice Age to be able to tell at the end how things changed, and all that kind of stuff.
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#7 Postby HURAKAN » Tue Oct 19, 2004 9:46 pm

Derecho wrote:2) It's believed some dinosaurs may have been warm-blooded.


I'm not sure about your argument. All dinosaurs were reptiles, even those that flied, so I don't know how a reptile could be warm-blooded, it like a mammal being cold-blooded. Impossible!
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#8 Postby HURAKAN » Tue Oct 19, 2004 9:53 pm

Habitat

Earth’s environment during the dinosaurian era was far different than it is today. The days were several minutes shorter than they are today because the gravitational pull of the sun and the moon have over time had a braking influence on Earth’s rotation. Radiation from the Sun was not as strong as it is today because the Sun has been slowly brightening over time.

Other changes in the environment may be linked to the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide, a gas that traps heat from the Sun in Earth’s atmosphere—the so-called greenhouse effect—was several times more abundant in the air during the dinosaurian age. As a result, surface temperatures were warmer and no polar ice caps could form.

The pattern of continents and oceans was also very different during the age of dinosaurs. At the beginning of the dinosaurian era, the continents were united into a gigantic supercontinent called Pangaea (all lands), and the oceans formed a vast world ocean called Panthalassa (all seas). About 200 million years ago, movements of Earth’s crust caused the supercontinent to begin slowly separating into northern and southern continental blocks, which broke apart further into the modern continents by the end of the dinosaurian era.

As a result of these movements of Earth’s crust (see Plate Tectonics), there was less land in equatorial regions than there is at present. Deserts, possibly produced by the warm, greenhouse atmosphere, were widespread across equatorial land, and the tropics were not as rich an environment for life forms as they are today. Plants and animals may have flourished instead in the temperate zones north and south of the equator.

The most obvious differences between dinosaurian and modern environments are the types of life forms present. There were fewer than half as many species of plants and animals on land during the Mesozoic Era than there are today. Bushes and trees appear to have provided the most abundant sources of food for dinosaurs, rather than the rich grasslands that feed most animals today. Although flowering plants appeared during the dinosaurian era, few of them bore nuts or fruit.

The animals of the period had slower metabolisms and smaller brains, suggesting that the pace of life was relatively languid and the behavior patterns were simple. The more active animals—such as ants, wasps, birds, and mammals—first made their appearance during the dinosaurian era but were not as abundant as they are now.

ENCARTA
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Re: Dinosaur fossil found above Artic Circle

#9 Postby x-y-no » Wed Oct 20, 2004 8:48 am

MGC wrote: Just more evidence that Man induced gobal warming is part of a left wing anti-American agenda.......MGC


Could some Mod please move these global warming threads to the Politics forum where they belong (and I have pledged not to post)? If I have to keep looking at inflamatory comments like this, or the ones in the other thread about "environmental nuts" and implying that climate scientists are so corrupt as to "mold 'facts' to fit pre-existing conclusions" then I am going to have to start answering in the mode such garbage deserves. And knowing the political climate of this place, I'm the one who'll wind up suspended.

I have restricted myself from posting in the politics forum specifically to avoid falling into the trap of crossing the sensibilities of the reactionary crowd and again suffering that fate. It's intolerable that I can't even have this one refuge from this [expletive deleted].
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#10 Postby sponger » Wed Oct 20, 2004 9:17 am

Its some intertesting reading while the tropics winds down. If a Cat 4 were threatening land I could understand but we all have to deal with political intrusions in every thing from the nightly news to my Wife "Gilmore Girls". The elections will be over shortly! I dont think their is much of an argument that much of the envirionmental movement has a anti capitalist anti corporate agenda....No matter what your political affilation
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#11 Postby Wnghs2007 » Wed Oct 20, 2004 10:29 am

WOW. Pretty cool find. I wonder what next we will discover :D
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#12 Postby breeze » Wed Oct 20, 2004 8:16 pm

Tyrannosaurus Rex lived in the forests and plains of the Northwestern United States (Montana, Texas, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico), Canada (Alberta and Saskatchewan), and East Asia (Mongolia). About 30 incomplete fossils have been found throughout the US, Canada and East Asia.
Warmblooded vs. Coldblooded is still as widely
debated as hunter vs. scavenger. Throughout most of the Cretaceous Period, a long seaway extending from the Arctic region to the Gulf of Mexico divided the continent of North America. The width of the sea varied with changes in the global sea level. During the reign of T. rex, the sea stretched as far west as the western part of present-day South Dakota and as far east as present-day Wisconsin.
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