Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis: Colville River Grazer, Duck-Billed Hadrosaur

The 6,000+ Colville River grazer skeletal remains emerge as:

• few adults and many juveniles in north Alaska’s Prince Creek geological formation on the Brooks Range’s north side;
• one of four Alaska-endemic dinosaurs with Alaskacephale gangloffi (Roland Gangloff’s Alaskan headbanger), Nanuqsaurus hoglundi (Forrest Hoglund’s polar bear lizard), and Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum (Ross and Margot Perot’s thick-nosed lizard).

They furnish physical addresses of:

• 100 miles (160.93 kilometers) south of the Arctic Ocean;
• 300 miles (482.80 kilometers) north of Fairbanks.

They therefore get funereal honors with other remains preserved in the 2- to 3-foot-thick (0.61- to 0.91-meter-thick) Liscomb bonebed.

Their graveyard honors Robert L. Liscomb, Shell Oil Company geologist and mapper discovering in 1961 Alaska’s red-brown, uncrushed, undistorted, unmineralized dinosaur bones. 

Scientific procedure is dynamic because of its commitment to examination and re-examination, interpretation and re-interpretation. For example, scientists traditionally judge Alaska as inhospitable to dinosaur life cycles and natural histories because of:

• cold;
• snow;
• 24-7 darkness six months annually.

But they now know of temperatures 10°F (12°C) higher and vegetation arboreally denser than nowadays sufficing to support dinosaurs year-round 70,000,000 years ago. The scientific method indeed leads paleontologists and zoologists to re-examine in the 1980s two decades of Liscomb specimens crated and misidentified as mammalian.

It makes Alaskan history with the subsequent recognition of:

• Colville River grazer similarities to Edmontosaurus species of Alberta, Montana, South Dakota;
• hadrosaurid (thick lizard) predominance among dinosaur specimens;
• non-nomadic, permanent dinosaur presences. 

Eye, mouth and skull configurations necessitate separate genus/species status for Edmontosaurus annectens and Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis. Colville River grazers otherwise offer recognizably crestless duck-billed hadrosaurid behaviors and physiques of:

• Godzilla-like plate-covered spines;
• mega-chicken footprint-like tracks;
• 3-foot-long (0.91-meter-long) juvenile hip-heights;
• 9-foot-long (2.74-meter-long) juvenile head-body lengths;
• 30-foot-long (9.1-meter-long) mature head-tail lengths;
• 1,400-toothed mouths for coarse vegetation-eating;
• two- and four-legged mobility.

Niching in 41 to 43°F (5 to 6.11°C) annual mean-temperatured, snow-prone, wind-exposed eco-systems indeed provide culturally enriching, educationally entertaining, and geo-historically enthralling insights concerning:

• birds, fish, small mammals, and 12+ more unidentified dinosaur genera/species in the oil-rich North Slope;
• cold-blooded, sun-heated fauna (crocodiles, lizards, turtles) non-representation;
• night-visioned, warm-blooded polar dinosaurs like Antarctica’s Cryolophosaurus ellioti and southeastern-most Australia’s Dinosaur Cove species.

My special thanks to talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet.

Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum numbers, along with Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis, as one of four Alaska-endemic dinosaurs.
Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum engaged in head-butting/pushing behavior; illustration by international wildlife and natural history artist Karen Carr
Anthony R. Fiorillo and Ronald S. Tykosk, An Immature Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum, PLOS ONE, vol. 8, issue 6 (June 19, 2013), Figure 1: Karen Carr, CC BY 2.0, via PLOS ONE/The Paleontology Collection @ https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0065802

Liscomb Bonebed outcrops for over 200 feet at base of bluffs of Alaska's Cretaceous Prince Creek Formation.
"A paleontologist searches for dinosaur bones.": UAMN photo by Patrick Druckenmiller, Please use with credit, via EurekAlert! @ https://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/926457

Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis in habitat
illustration by James Havens, Bangor, Maine-born and now Anchorage, Alaska-based
Paints depicts scene from ancient Alaska during the Cretaceous Period.: Please use with credit, via EurekAlert! @ https://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/926456

"Research Team Discovers 'Lost World' of Cold Weather Dinosaurs" (2:21)
Uploaded September 22, 2015, by FloridaState to YouTube ~ URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBVtUxpT34A

left lateral view: cranial reconstruction of Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis gen. et sp. nov. from early Maastrichtian Prince Creek Formation; photograph (A) and bone interpretation (B)
Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, vol. 61, issue 1 (March 2016)
Hirotsugu Mori et al., A new Arctic hadrosaurid from the Prince Creek Formation, Figure 4: CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons @ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ugrunaaluk.jpg

Prince Creek Formation bluffs: viewed north and down northern Alaska's Colville River
northern Alaska's dinosaur country: Explore Nature, CC BY 2.0, via National Park Service (NPS) @ http://nature.nps.gov/geology//nationalfossilday/mesozoic_arctic.cfm

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