Re: Mesozoic snow - refined

[Phil Bigelow <bigelowp@juno.com>]

On Wed, 7 Apr 2004 10:24:05 +0100 "Michael Lovejoy"
<michael@palaeoproductions.fsnet.co.uk> writes:
> I asked earlier about snow in the Mesozoic, and now I want to refine 
> that
> question - What's the opinion on snowfall in Hell Creek?


The Hell Creek landscape was lowland (lower coastal floodplain), and it
was adjacent to a warm inland sea that moderated the high and low temps. 
It may have snowed from time to time, but I doubt if any of the snow
stayed on the ground for long.  The Hell Creek landscape appears to have
had a climate similar to coastal Georgia and coastal Florida.


> 
> A while back there was an Open University program on the BBC that 
> suggested
> Hell Creek fell well below freezing in the winter,


"Well below freezing"??  Well sure....occassionally.  Typically?  I doubt
it.
I'd like to know where they got their primary data for making that claim.
 :-/



> but it was two in 
> the
> morning and I didn't get any references.
> 
> So what about it - can I paint Tyrannosaurs in the snow without 
> commiting
> scientific suicide?


Forget Hell Creek.  The snowfall evidence is equivocal for the Hell Creek
landscape.  But there is abundant evidence that tyrannosaurids lived in
northern Alaska in the latest Cretaceous (the evidence is mostly in the
form of isolated tyrannosaurid teeth, isolated tyrannosaurid vertebrae
and isolated tyrannosaurid pes).  It almost certainly snowed in northern
Alaska during the Maastrichtian.  Whether there was an *accumulation* of
snow pack in this area is presently unknown.

Greg Paul illustrated a tyrannosaur drinking from a frozen Alaskan lake
in his _Journal of Paleontology_ paper titled "Polar Dinosaurs".

<pb>
--














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