Pachyrhynosaurus - Polar - 53
Jul. 19th, 2014 03:37 pm
Pachyrhinosaurus canadensis is one of several Pachyrhinosaur species that lived in the high arctic of Canada and Alaska during the Late Cretaceous. While it was slightly less frigid at the time than it is now, winters were still dark and snowy. No fossilized Pachyrhinosaurs have preserved quills, but we do know that their ancestors were quilled, and it isn't beyond reasonable speculation to suspect that it may have had quills, possibly modified into something like a furry coat, in order to help it maintain body temperature during the winter. We also still don't know what these or other arctic herbivores ate during the winter - they may have migrated, some of them, but some fossils of this species were buried during spring snowmelt floods, suggesting that if they did migrate out of the snowy areas, they would have come back fairly early in the season.