Arctic Dinosaurs of Alaska

By Bonnye Matthews

A novel for middle grade readers. A year in the life of Pachyrhinosaurus and other dinosaurs living on the North Slope of Alaska seventy thousand years ago. They lived near each other and migrated together in a loose-knit community. The story follows Pakky as she experiences her first winter and learns about snow and ice. She meets other species of dinosaurs and is injured by ravenous Dromaeosaurus. In the spring, she migrates with her mother, Matriarch, back to their summer feeding ground. In her first year, she learns a life cycle. She discovers that green which makes her food so good, during the time of constant light, hides in the lights in the sky during the time of constant dark, while they starve. She learns green returns during the time of light-moving-to-constant light. A reason for hope when starving. Images are available for coloring by download.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fathom Publishing
• Release date: Aug 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781954896024

Bonnye Matthews

Alaskan author, Bonnye Matthews is the award-winning writer of the Winds of Change series on the peopling of the Americas before the ice age. After five years of intense research, she chose to write from the Pre-Clovis view, as it is supported by recent genetic evidence and new fossil and artifact findings of the last decade or so, plus more than 400 sites in the Americas. Her thirst for knowledge in this area follows the footsteps of Thomas Dillehay, J. M. Adocvasio, and many other archaeologists. She dreams of the day when a Homo erectus specimen has finally donated a viable genetic specimen. The Winds of Change series includes the following books: 1. Ki'ti's Story, 75,000 BC, the thrilling tale of how Neanderthals, Cromagnons, and Homo erectus race to avoid the ashfall from a supervolcano (based on the eruption of Mt. Toba, called Bambas in the novel); 2. Manak-Na's Story, 75,000 BC, the story of a father who travels from China/Mongolia by boat to Mexico and back, seeing people in the Americas; 3. Zamimolo's Story: 50,000 BC, where Zamimolo struggles with the terrifying new environment after migrating from Asia to Central America; 4. Tuksook's Story: 35,000 BC, where The People flee to Alaska to survive a terrible drought; 5. The SealEaters, 20,000 BC, a survival story of the Solutreans in Northern Europe as they face ice from the North and war from the East and South, explore and find a new homeland in the Americas. After winning awards for each of her titles, Bonnye has begun a new series continuing her focus on Pre-Clovis sites in the Americas - this time set in ancient Mexico, and beginning with Freedom, 25,000 BC. Contact Bonnye here: Website: www.booksbybonnye.com Facebook: http://facebook.com/pages/Bonnye-Matthews/484231424985849?ref=hl# Facebook Prehistoric Fiction Writers and Readers Campfire https://www.facebook.com/groups/1466936593554809/1511142539134214/?notif_t=group_comment Twitter: @BonnyeMatthews

Book preview

Expanding Experiences with Arctic Dinosaurs

About the Author

Dedication

Robert Liscomb, the Father of Arctic Dinosaurs

Robert Liscomb was an oil geologist. In 1961, he was working along the Colville River near Ocean Point and discovered bones. He may have thought they were mammal bones, possibly megafauna. He carried the specimens back to his workplace and wrote up a description of the find. He sent them to the Shell Oil warehouse where they were duly stored. The next year, Robert Liscomb died at age thirty-seven in a rock slide.

In the 1980s, the bones were re-discovered in the warehouse. The bones were sent to the U. S. Geological Survey in 1983 where Charles (Chuck) Repenning, a paleontologist, identified the find as dinosaur bones. From that point Arctic dinosaurs became a thing, and the search for Alaska dinosaurs was on.

Arctic Dinosaurs of Alaska is dedicated to Robert Liscomb who recognized the fossils he found had significance and saw that they were properly stored for future study.

This book celebrates him as the father of Arctic Dinosaurs.

Ugrunaaluk bones similar to Liscomb find. Courtesy of Patrick S. Druckenmiller.

Colorist

Arctic Dinosaurs of Alaska is designed for coloring. If you color your book, your name belongs on the line below. I advise use of colored pencils and a soft cardboard, not corrugated, under the page being colored to avoid denting underlying pages. Markers will likely bleed through the paper.

Around the colorist block there are other living things from Cretaceous Arctic Alaska. We know, for example, that dragonflies were there. The one on the left has just shed its exoskeleton. There were magnolias and the way they looked varied from time to time and place to place. Fruit producing vines (Ampelopsis) were present in the Arctic along with bugs (Cissites), clams (Nucula), and spiraled shell snails. When possible, the species or genus is identified; you can learn more by searching internet articles or images. Because many details remain unknown, feel free to express your creativity as you color. Have fun with it!

Foreword

Alaskan dinosaurs? At first glance, these words seem contradictory. As reptiles, dinosaurs bring to mind scenes of sunny, warm, tropical environments. But Alaska is seemingly just the opposite of that—dark, cold, Arctic. Alaska was not always as we know it today. About seventy million years ago Alaska was indeed home to a rich assortment of dinosaurs. We know this because of discoveries of bones, teeth, and dinosaur tracks made in many different parts of this enormous state.

At present, the single best place to find dinosaur fossils in Alaska is the northernmost tier of the state, in an area we call the North Slope. Hidden under this frozen, treeless landscape are rocks that tell a story of when Alaska was a warmer and forested environment teeming with dinosaurs, birds, and even flying reptiles. Fortunately for paleontologists like myself, rivers cut down through the tundra to expose the rocks underneath and provide places where we can dig up their remains, describe new species, and reconstruct their environments.

After many years of digging in challenging conditions, paleontologists such as myself have slowly pieced together a better understanding of the life and times of Arctic dinosaurs. We have learned a lot: at least thirteen species of dinosaurs lived here, ranging from small dog-sized plant and meat-eaters, up to multi-ton giants like duck-billed and horned dinosaurs and even a top-dog predator related to Tyrannosaurus rex. We know they lived in forested settings because we find petrified logs, and we can even use leaf fossils to help us understand that the climate was warmish, but not hot, and that snow was likely during the long, dark winter months.

While we might know the kinds of dinosaurs that lived, we don’t know what life was like for individual members of a given species. What struggles did they face every year? What did the world look like as they tried to survive in this challenging environment?

In Arctic Dinosaurs of Alaska, we get to enter into the minds of Arctic dinosaurs. True, we don’t really know what went on in their relatively small brains, but the very fact they lived there for millions of years suggests they knew what they were doing, and they had the skills necessary to survive many challenges they faced. In the process of imagining their lives, we open a window into a world unlike anything on Earth today.

Patrick S. Druckenmiller, PhD

University of Alaska Museum of the North

Department of Geosciences, University of Alaska Fairbanks

Acknowledgments

Without the assistance of several people this book would not exist. These people are my brother, Randy Matthews; Sally Sutherland; and Rebecca Goodrich, the latter of whom relentlessly read and re-read the text. Each contributed far in excess of what could be expected or hoped for based on family, friendship, or love of reading. Additional adult reviews occurred at the Alaska Writers Guild Critique Group in Wasilla and the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators Critique Group in Palmer.

I received assistance from Patrick Druckenmiller, Ph.D., Director and Earth Sciences Curator, University of Alaska Museum, Professor, Department of Geosciences, University of Alaska Fairbanks. I asked for his assistance in answering questions for which I couldn’t find answers, such as which Arctic dinosaurs had feathers, likely pachyrhinosaurus reproductive cycles, and whether my speculated migration could be reasonable for Arctic dinosaurs.

Last, but hardly least, I want to thank the participants from the Matanuska-Susitna Borough’s Young Writers Conference 2018 in Palmer, Alaska, at the Sherrod Elementary School. The conference is designed for elementary school students who have a desire to write when they are grown. They attend three presentations from local authors at the conference. I’ve been a presenter at the conference for years, and during development, I had the unique opportunity in two successive years to let the students experience a real critique group. They read part of the first two chapters, examined the images, and filled out critique sheets. I asked those who were willing to give their names to write them on their critique sheets, so I could acknowledge their assistance in the book. Here are those who gave me their names. I am grateful to them and those who remain unnamed for giving me their honest assessment of the book. They took the task very seriously, supplying me with candid comments, which were very useful. For me it was a chance to learn from the real target audience. Those who let me name them are: Rileigh Day, Samantha Marshall, Peter Isackson, Kylea Frantzich, Allison Brewer, Tahlya Rice, Colton H. Gauger, Catalina Edgar, Kade Russell, Kailyn, Caleb Moats, Elias, Corbin Sullivan, Makayla Sierra, Claire Wallstrum, Kaylah Goodwin, Andrew Penyak. Thank you!

Bonnye Matthews

December 23, 2021

Introduction

Storytime! Let’s time travel back—far, far back—back to about seventy million years ago, geologists say. Where are we going? We’re off to Alaska, the 49th state in the United States on the North American continent, northwest of Canada.

We’re so far north we’re in the Arctic! Top of the earth! The dinosaur species in this book are from the Prince Creek Formation along the Colville River between the Brooks Range and the Arctic Ocean. It’s cold that far north. What kept the dinosaurs from freezing? It was warmer in Alaska seventy million years ago. Oh, it became dark and cold enough to snow in winter, but that far north experienced temperatures more like southern Alaska winters today in Juneau. How the dinosaurs stayed warm—probably they were endothermic, regulating heat within their own bodies, not having to sit on a sun-heated rock to warm up—and beyond that, think feathers and fat, think migration, hibernation, and adaptation.

The one thing science makes crystal clear is that in living systems—there is constant change. The living earth changes constantly. Today the Arctic dinosaur fossils lie in the spot shown on the map below. That is the NOW location. At this time the Arctic Circle lies at latitude 66°30’ North.

When these Arctic dinosaurs lived, they could not have traveled across the United States from coast to coast. A big Western Interior Seaway, too wide to swim across, blocked the way. Things were extraordinarily different! Their THEN location identifies where these dinosaurs were living at the near top of a skinny strip of land running north to south. The Arctic Circle then was at latitude 67° North.

Constant change is also shown in the environment where the dinosaurs lived. They had totally different conditions from those we experience. They lived in the Greenhouse Earth while we live in the Icehouse Earth. Climate constantly changes but it does so over very long periods of time, hundreds of millions of years. In Greenhouse Earth, it’s a lot