Lori Townsend: Dinosaurs once roamed here in Alaska, and scientists are learning more about how they adapted to the climate.

Unknown: These dinosaurs were thriving up here.

They were here probably year round.

Lori Townsend: What can studying these prehistoric giants tell us about how the Arctic will adapt to warming temperatures brought on by climate change?

We're discussing that right now on Alaska Insight.

Earlier this summer, three scientists ventured to the foot of the Aleutian mountain range to collect evidence that dinosaurs once roamed the southern coast of the Alaska Peninsula.

They hope to reconstruct the ancient ecosystem that allowed dinosaurs to thrive here for tens of thousands of years.

As Emily Schwing reports, their research might also provide vital clues about the impact of ancient climate change, as Alaska rapidly warms today.

Unknown: It's been years since this team has been able to make the long complicated trip to Aniakchak National Monument It's certainly with respect to high latitude, Arctic dinosaur polar dinosaur stories.

This will be the most comprehensive story yet.

70 million years ago, the climate in Alaska was more like Seattle today.

But even back then, it was still cold for giant reptiles.

So how exactly did they survive, especially in winter?

This beach may hold some answers.

There's lots of interesting things that you can determine and understand by looking at fossil soils.

Fossils soils, also known as paleosols, run throughout the cliffs along the coast at Aniakchak Bay, and they hold all kinds of information about the ancient landscape.

You know, the rocks are really interesting, you can read them like a book.

Each layer of ancient soil is like a chapter in that book.

By being able to look at these rocks in detail over a 300 meter section along the coast where all the tracks are being found, we'll be able to not only say you know there were dinosaurs here, but where were they living?

Are there different places throughout this section, for example, that they were happ or less happy because they're more abundant?

More than 90% of the dinosaur footprints these scientists have recorded here, were made by hadrosaurs.

It's a duck build plant eating dinosaur that walked on two feet.

Hadrosaurs are the most successful plant eating dinosaurs.

It's because you find hadrosaurid fossils from all continents except for Australia, and India, subcontinent India.

So it was everywhere, including Africa.

On this trip, the team also made a mold of a footprint they discovered this summer, the paleontologists believe it was laid down by Magnoavipes, an ancient crane like bird.

One thing that comes out of these, all these rocks is that these dinosaurs were thriving up here.

They were here, probably year-around, I mean, there's a lot of evidence to suggest that.

They were raising their young.

So a warming Arctic in the future, will still be biologically productive.

So, if you will, that's a lesson of hope that comes out of this.

The history locked in these rocks, he says, could help evaluate future climate change.

These data help, could help inform the modeling for the future of the modern Arctic as it continues to warm.

By following the footsteps of the dinosaurs and collecting information about their surroundings, the team says it may help us better understand and prepare for the future to avoid stumbling into an unknown ecosystem of our own.

In Aniakchak Bay, I'm Emily Schwing for Alaska Public Media.

Lori Townsend: Thanks, Emily for that fascinating look at some of Alaska's ancient past.

Joining me to discuss his findings and what they may signal about the future is our first guest for this evening, Tony Fiorillo, a paleontologist and senior research fellow at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.

Hello, Tony.

Hi, how are you?

Good.

It's great to visit with you again.

You've been on Talk of Alaska with us in the past, but this is the first time you're visiting on Alaska Insight and it's really nice to welcome you here this evening.

Tony, you and I have talked a few times about your work in Alaska.

When did you first start doing dinosaur research here?

Unknown: The first trip to Alaska was to the North Slope and that was in 1998.

It was with an invitation from then-curator at the University of Alaska Museum in Fairbanks, Dr. Roland Gangloff.

You know, I had conversations and one day he just said, Why don't you come up?

And I did and I haven't looked back.

Lori Townsend: How does Alaska compare to other states when it comes to variety of dinosaurs species and, and also new discoveries?

Unknown: Well, that's one of the things that really intrigued me about coming to Alaska was that, really, there's been so little effort done here.

You can go to a place like Wyoming, for example.

And you would see one field camp on one side of a barbed wire fence and another field camp on the other side of barbed wire fence, basically doing the exact same thing.

And Alaska was essentially an unknown territory in terms of its dinosaur resources.

The number of finds, probably you can count on one hand, five fingers, maybe.

And now it seems like you can't go 10 steps without tripping over some evidence of a dinosaur, anywhere in the state.

So it's been a very satisfying journey for me and my team.

Lori Townsend: That's fascinating.

And when you think about the enormous size of Alaska, how did you figure out or come to choose the locations where you've gone so far, looking for dinosaurs here?

Unknown: Well, it starts with talking to pretty much everyone, anybody that you think, might know something, eyes on the ground to help you understand where you might have the best chance of finding something.

And by everyone, I mean, you really focus a lot on the oil and gas geology people, the people that are out there doing exploratory work.

And I would say that there was a, give a shout out to Gil Mull who used to work for the state, he actually just recently passed away in the last week or so.

But he was a giant, incredibly generous with the information, of willing to listen to ideas offer his insights.

And I would say that my start started with several conversations with Gil Mull.

And then the National Park Service in the Alaska Region, the Anchorage office, they came forward and offered a tremendous amount of support, because they were intrigued by the possibilities, as well as there was some government guidance on being accountable for fossil resources in national parks.

So the timing was such that things just worked out very well.

And I would say they were the next major partner that helped me search for the places to go look.

Lori Townsend: Well describe your work for us over this summer.

What are some of the new discoveries that came from what you found in this past year's work?

Unknown: Well, here we are in 2021.

And as it turns out, August of 2001 was one of those times that the National Park Service was willing to take a gamble with me.

And they Lori Townsend: And and fewer raised eyebrows at this point, partnered with me to wrap the Aniakchak River from the caldera all the way up in the Aniakchak Bay.

And you can imagine that here's a guy from Dallas, who comes to a national park where there are no dinosaur records in any national park in Alaska.

And he says to the National Park Service, I think I can find one in your park.

And so you can imagine there's a certain amount of raised eyebrow aspect to this.

And you know, anybody wants to beat the Texas heat so go north.

But as it turns out, we did this wonderful whitewater trip.

And the partner and key partner there is still with the park and we were able to celebrate the 20 year anniversary, and Troy Hammond, who was in Katmai, and they administer any act check.

But we rafted the river together and literally within the last couple of hours of that trip, I came across some dinosaur footprints.

And that record is the first record for any dinosaur in any Alaskan National Park period.

And so that starts 20 years ago back in August and since then the National Park Service and my team were able to find three more park units, so there's actually four national park units in Alaska that have a dinosaur record and you it's been an exciting experience, you know, I think one of the messages might be, you have to be willing to, if given that we're in playoffs in baseball, you have to be willing to stand at the plate and swing and miss and accept that, because there's a lot of missing.

But sometimes when you connect, it's it is a glorious thing to find.

And we have this great, multidisciplinary team that looks at all kinds of angles, like my eyes will see one thing, but having these other train guys will see other things and together, it makes for telling some compelling stories.

And that's where we are.

too.

Yeah.

So so.

So Tony, you found lots of dinosaur footprints in Aniakchak.

But I also understand that you discovered fossils from plants and collected ancient soil samples, we saw some of that in the package story.

Why were you looking at these kinds of things also, what's what does that tell us?

Unknown: Well, I mean, you go outside, and you go into any environment, there's more than one component to it.

So we really are trying to understand the various aspects of the ancient ecology and climate of the system that a dinosaur might have lived in.

And so finding the dinosaurs is just part of it.

What in, in the case of the dinosaurs that we find mostly in Aniakchak, they're plant eaters, well, what kinds of plants are out there?

And the soils record much about climate.

And when we get to climate, where there's a number of aspects to climate, we really focus on ancient temperature, and ancient precipitation, those are things that we can actually measure from the rocks.

So one of the things that we did find this year that we've actually not found, and there's been no record since was a very interesting leaf.

And the way to describe it is it's close to a modern chestnut or hickory.

And why were we excited about that?

That leaf tells us those points today are climatically restricted, they live in a lower latitudes compared to where Aniakchak is today.

So this tells us something about the mean annual temperature of Aniakchak at the time that dinosaurs walked there.

So we're very excited about that leaf.

And then the soils and some of the carbon, that we can get out of the soils and out of the plants tell us something about precipitation.

And from what we've seen so far, with the analyses we've done, is the mean annual precipitation, any any actec was crazy.

It was beyond what Miami gets in a year.

So there's something that we're not quite understanding how the system is working.

But we do know that there were a lot of duckbilled dinosaurs, that there were a lot of plants and whatever else was going on, we seem to be thriving there.

Lori Townsend: And, Tony, we need to transition here in a moment.

But quickly, what's coming next for your research into Alaska is dinosaurs on the Alaska Peninsula?

Unknown: Well, we're trying to figure out how to get back out there and expand the search and maybe some new areas and do more effort to tie various components together.

Like I said, we're there's still things we don't understand, like how does this precipitation model fit into everything else we're seeing?

So we're spending time working on things like that.

This weekend, for example, we have a student that's going to present some of her thesis work at in a at the annual Geological Society of America meeting in Portland.

Her presentation's on Sunday.

And so this is one of the first steps in presenting what we think we know, to our scientific peers so they can either love us or beat on us, their choice.

Lori Townsend: Well, it's always fantastic to visit with you, Tony and learn more about your fascinating work.

So thank you so much.

It was a treat to learn about the research that Tony has been doing in the Arctic.

And the information is so fascinating.

I love to learn more about our ancient past and especially here in Alaska and how it's connected to now, today and the future.

So to continue this discussion we're now going to hear from another paleontologist studying dinosaurs in the Arctic and throughout Alaska.

Patrick Druck, Druckenmiller, excuse me.

Patrick Druckenmiller is the director of the University of Alaska Museum in Fairbanks and a professor in the Department of Geosciences at UAF.

His work has taken him to field sites around the western United States and throughout Alaska from Southeast to the North Slope.

His research ranges from prehistoric marine reptiles to mammoth migration, and we'll learn more about what he referred to as little gold mines -- discoveries of tiny bits of evidence that baby dinosaurs were in the area of the Colville River, even in winter.

Welcome, Patrick.

Unknown: Hello.

Happy to be here.

Lori Townsend: Thanks so much for joining us.

Before we discuss some North Slope discoveries, give us an overview of the distribution of dinosaur discoveries in Alaska.

In your work, how widespread and how do the species vary across the state?

Unknown: Well, the really interesting thing is, Alaska has a lot yet to be discovered.

So for starters, we do know that we can find dinosaur fossils, pretty much from one end of the state to the other.

And that alone is pretty exciting.

Most of those dinosaur fossils that we found are from the Cretaceous period.

So that would be mostly between about 100 million years ago to about 70 million years ago.

We have just a very small handful of fossils from the Jurassic period, that are dinosaurs.

And what's what's really amazing is, although they're all over that they're potentially all over the state, we almost know very little about who was there.

Because these areas are all very remote.

They're far unexplored for the most part.

And so we've focused our attention on just a couple of areas, particularly on the North Slope along the Colville River, in particular.

Denali National Park, and as well as a few other spots throughout the state, where they're reasonably accessible.

Lori Townsend: A study you published in July is all about the remains of baby dinosaurs, bones and teeth, you and your colleagues discovered up on the North Slope.

What does this tell us about dinosaurs in the far north?

Unknown: Well, the most amazing thing about Alaskan dinosaurs is, it's important to remember that the dinosaurs that that lives here in Alaska, and particularly those that we find on the North Slope, were the northern most dinosaurs on planet Earth.

And they were not only located in the Arctic 70 million years ago, they are actually located farther north than where we find them today, they were located at latitudes as high as 80 degrees north or even more.

These things were practically at the North Pole.

So what makes them globally significant is if you want to understand dinosaurs living at the extremes that were possible for dinosaurs, finding them in Alaska, and the North Slope is the best place in the world to do that.

So when we found, so there's just so many different questions about how did a dinosaur live up in these parts of the world where it was seasonally very dark, four months of winter darkness, where it was cold, and there was probably snow in the winter?

How did dinosaurs do that?

So in that context, it was really remarkable to discover that the baby dinosaur bones and teeth that we were finding revealed that most of the species we've been able to really study up there, probably were nesting up there as well.

And because they were nesting up there, they were probably year-round residents in the Arctic.

And that just means like, you know, wow, what a crazy place for a dinosaur to live in.

It's just not the picture we typically imagine for dinosaurs.

Lori Townsend: Well, and if they didn't migrate, do you have ideas about how they were able to survive this far north?

Unknown: That that's part of you know, the the research questions that that keeps us all motivated and moving ahead with new research.

So there's some ideas.

I mean, so some, some dinosaurs that lived up there probably, like especially the meat eating dinosaurs probably were covered in their own down parkas, if you will.

They were probably feathered, and that alone would have provided insulation that would have helped them get through the winter.

But the plant eating dinosaurs, we're not sure whether they were feather they may not have been feathered.

So if you're a small plant eating dinosaur, and some of them really were as adults, actually only about the same size as a small dog, perhaps some of those dinosaurs were capable of hibernating actually digging into the ground in a burrow, and hibernating and overwintering that way.

But many of the species we know best, like horned dinosaurs, duckbilled dinosaurs, they were large animals.

They were multi-ton animals.

They were plant eaters.

What did they do in the winter?

Well, they might have done something very similar to what moose do today, is they toughed it out.

They have to spend several months of the year getting fattened up on a rich seasonal abundance of food, and then spend the winter basically losing weight subsisting off of lower quality forage.

So that's a possibility.

But these are the kinds of questions that we're hoping to still address with ongoing research.

Lori Townsend: And, and a follow up to that, in a study from 2015 you and colleagues of yours theorize that perhaps dinosaurs, reptiles could regulate their body temperature as you were just talking about or perhaps weren't as cold blooded as they they either were theorized to be or may have been later.

Is this still an idea you're considering?

And how would that have changed throughout time?

Unknown: Yeah, I think there's been a growing body of evidence from many different workers now, taking multiple different kinds of approaches to the question of dinosaur warm bloodedness.

Were they warm blooded?

How were they weren't blooded.

How did that differ?

I'd say the overwhelming evidence suggests from these myriad studies is that yes, dinosaurs definitely were not, they were not like a lizard.

They were not hauling themselves out every morning and waiting for sunlight to warm them up.

They had some capacity for generating their own internal body heat, and they maintained a relatively constant level of body heat.

And so that's really similar to what birds and mammals do today.

Now, did they do it exactly like birds and mammals?

Probably not.

And there's variation and, you know, there's shades of gray on, on warm bloodedness.

So these dinosaurs, the fact that they were up there, that they were had that we know, like the meat eating dinosaurs were probably feathered, that suggests that they were generating their own internal body heat, they were almost certainly warm blooded, to some extent.

And here's the coolest piece of information, actually, that sort of helps build that picture.

To date, of all the fossils we've found up on the North Slope, the majority of them are dinosaurs, but we're also finding bird fossils.

And we're also finding fossils from small little mouse-sized mammals as well.

And of course, birds, mammals, they're warm blooded.

Dinosaurs very likely warm blooded to some extent, what we've never found are the typical cold blooded members of the community that are found at lower latitudes where it was warmer, so things like amphibians and lizards and crocodilians and turtles.

Those are all cold blooded animals, we don't find a single fossil of any of those creatures in the Arctic.

And I think they were not there because the temperatures and the climate did not allow them to live there.

Only members of that special club of warm blooded animals were capable of of subsisting up there.

Lori Townsend: That is so fascinating.

So are they the same?

The species that were warm blooded, here, are they the same relatives in lower latitudes, but they just learned how to adapt their body temperature to survive this climate?

Unknown: I think dinosaurs broadly speaking, were warm blooded, globally, in most of their environments that they lived in.

What what might have been slightly different for polar dinosaurs is they might have had some special little tricks up their sleeves or modifications of their physiology that allowed them to be better, to better cope with with the environment, but those might have been more like behavioral things or again, things to do with their integument their, their body coverings.

But, but clearly the, the dinosaurs in in, in Alaska were, were they were basically, you know, warm blooded to one extent or another.

And I think that's one of the things that made dinosaurs globally, a very successful group of animals, they were around for 140 million years.

And part of that was that they, they had this actual extra physiological capacity to go out and conquer the world.

Lori Townsend: Clearly!

Years ago, you discovered thousands of dinosaur tracks along the Yukon River, it seems like evidence of dinosaurs, as we've been discussing are, it's found all over the state.

Where else would you like to look for them?

Unknown: Oh, boy, there's a lot of a lot of places really.

You know, it's no great secret, I'll tell you the secret to finding dinosaurs in Alaska is you've just got to find the right rocks from the right time.

And that is, that information exists in the form of geological maps, and that are freely available.

You know, we know what the geology of Alaska is, in the broad sense.

We know where we can find Cretaceous sedimentary rocks, that's the kind of rocks you'd expect to find a dinosaur fossil.

And there's a lot of places in the state that we would then look and say, okay, here's an area of the state say, down in the Kuskokwim area.

There's a lot of Cretaceous sedimentary rocks and here's a couple of big river drainage ditches, we would then take a float trip and use the highways, you know, use the rivers as highways as they've been used for thousands of years to explore these corridors looking at the rocks.

So Southwest Alaska, definitely more stories there.

North Slope of Alaska is of course a vast area that many of the rivers that crisscross the North Slope have potential for basically excavating deep enough down to reach the bedrock, the Cretaceous bedrock that might have fossils.

And those have been partially explored or explored to a limited extent.

But there's much more to be done.

Some of the mountainous areas of West Central Alaska more Cretaceous rocks, they're in vicinity of the Yukon River where we found many tracks.

It's really the sky, the sky's the limit.

Lori Townsend: Well, thank you so much, Pat.

It's been so fun to talk with you about your fascinating work.

Thanks so much to both of my guests this evening, Tony Fiorillo and Pa Druckenmiller for bringing thei research into Alaska's past t light for all of us.

That's i for this edition of Alaska I sight.

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I'm ori Townsend.

Good night.