New Arctic dinosaur fossils discovered in Colville River

By
Suzanne Downing
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4

THE SMITHSONIAN

The “Liscomb Bone Bed” along the Colville River in Alaska’s North Slope is full of duck-billed dinosaur fossils.

Over 99 percent of the 6,000 dinosaur fossils pulled from the quarry are hadrosaurines, a branch of the hadrosaur, or non-crested duck-billed dinosaur tree.

A newly identified fossil, however, adds unexpected variety to the prehistoric Arctic ecosystem: Researchers found the fossilized remains of a lambeosaurine, a crested duck-billed dino, according to a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports.

In 2014, paleontologists from the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas were examining fossils from the 70 million-year-old bone bed when they came across a fragment of skull that seemed different from the others.

Most of the bones in Liscomb came from a species of hadrosaur called Edmontosaurus, but the team believed this fragment might come from a theropod dinosaur. When that turned out not to be the case, the museum filed the bone fragment away with the other hadrosaurs.

Hokkaido (Japan) University graduate student Ryuji Takasaki came to the museum to study the hadrosaur fossils. He, too, picked up on the strange skull fragment.

[Read more at the Smithsonian magazine.]

[Read another version at CBC]

4 COMMENTS

  1. Everywhere you turn in the media and/or on the web these days, one is treated to “Utqiagvik” rather than “Barrow”. In this piece, however, there is no mention of “Kuukpik” (yes, it isn’t just a name on the side of a building on 36th Avenue), only “Colville”. We have to be consistent when it comes to imperialist racist tanik names, you know.

      • Glad you asked. Hopefully you’ve already familiarized yourself with the issue of Barrow versus Utqiagvik. On this site, notice how Suzanne often uses “Utqiagvik (Barrow)”. On various mainstream media sites, your comment will be censored for mere mention of Barrow. Certain segments of the world at large took a local referendum which passed by a slim margin and whose total vote reflected a small percentage of the community’s population to be an absolute mandate to eradicate the name “Barrow”, offering a rationale that the name is “imperialist” and “racist”. This was similar to the effort to eliminate the name Wade Hampton in favor of Kusilvak because Wade Hampton the person was said to be a “terrorist”.
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        So we’re being sold a bill of goods, but who’s doing the selling here? The Colville River also has an indigenous name that is rarely ever acknowledged, which was largely the point of my original comment. I went to the Anchorage Museum for First Friday last week. There was a display where Utqiagvik was mentioned repeatedly. In one part of the display, next to a mention of Utqiagvik was a photo said to be taken in Arctic Village, not Vashraii K’oo. This is part of the strategy. Barrow/Utqiagvik is the northermost populated place in the United States, with nearby Point Barrow being the northernmost point of land in the United States. Therefore, this is important enough to keep pushing in this case, but “dinky little places no one cares about” aren’t worth referring to in the same context.
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        Another display at the Museum implies that the Natives have always recognized indigenous names, that they’ve been appopriated by the evil white man in recent times for their own purposes and that a number of these names have been “restored”. One such example given is Nunam Iqua, known as Sheldon Point until 1999. I came across the program for the 1971 AFN convention recently. As an aside, this convention was held in Fairbanks. This is worth noting because in recent years, the media stated that the first AFN convention held in Fairbanks was in 1988. Anyway, this program had a photo of a Yup’ik elder. The caption on the next page stated that she hailed from Sheldon Point, not Nunam Iqua. I don’t know about today, but AFN at the time was entirely run and almost entirely staffed by Natives. If they’ve always recognized indigenous names, how could it be that she was said to be from Sheldon Point and not Nunam Iqua? Could it be that this drive to “restore” Native names is really coming from white people in academia and the media?

  2. Evidence Republicans and SUVs existed in prehistoric times and caused the extinction of dinosaurs, obviously.

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