NOVA: Arctic Dinosaurs

Special features include printable materials for educators and described video for the visually impaired
Arctic Dinosaurs: Warm-Blooded Creatures of the Cretaceous is an episode of the award-winning public television series NOVA, now available on DVD. A field expedition sets out Alaska's North Slope to search for the answer to a quandary: how did dinosaurs survive in the dark and frigid polar regions? Researchers dig a tunnel into the permafrost in order to collect dinosaur bones, an activity that carries its own perils, while other experts decipher the evidence in order to bring their hypotheses to life with CGI animation. Special features include printable materials for educators and described video for the visually impaired. An amazing fresh look at these remarkable ancient reptiles, perfect for school and public library DVD collections as well as for the enjoyment of dinosaur lovers everywhere. 56 minutes, closed captioned.

opens up some intriguing questions
Nova documentaries have always been first rate. I don't think I've ever seen a Nova documentary I didn't like. This documenatary on Arctic dinosaurs is no exception. This documentary takes us above the arctic circle to examine curious fosils scientists have found there. We see reconstructions and animations of the fosils and discussions on the finds. How did they live? What did they eat? How did they survive the polar winters? These are some of the many intriguing questions asked. There are several plausible sounding answers, but no one knows for sure whether they are correct. The most intriguing suggestion is that the current theory as to how the dinosaurs became extinct has been precluded. If the arctic dinosaurs could survive polar winters, then surely they would have been able to survive an asteroid or meteor crashing into earth and the resulting debris blocking out the sun for a while. So how did the dinosaurs become extinct?

Under the pole star
"Arctic Dinosaurs" is a fascinating NOVA-PBS documentary about fossil finds of dinosaurs in northern Alaska, a region relatively close to the North Pole. Indeed, it was even closer during the so-called Age of the Reptiles. How could dinosaurs, large and supposedly cold-blooded, thrive under such conditions?

Painstaking research seems to suggest that the Alaskan climate during the Cretaceous wasn't Arctic, but temperate. It resembled that of the Alaskan panhandle. However, this still means that the winters were cold and forbidding. Add to this the "Arctic night". For various reasons, palaeontologists believe that the surprising diversity of dinosaur species found in the North Slope didn't migrate further south, but stayed put.

This opens up a lot of intriguing questions about dinosaur biology. Were they really cold-blooded, like crocodiles or lizards? Or were they actually warm-blooded? Birds, after all, are warm-blooded - and they descend from dinosaurs...

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