#40degreeday

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S/o to onthesceneny.com for posting @plexlongbbe single #40degreeday on their site #bbe #smilesandcries2 #dmv #reston #va #hiphop

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Polar Dinosaurs, Stringer Bell, and the 40 Degree Night

The world has changed a lot in 200 million years. You probably know about PANGAEA: SUPERCONTINENT, and at least one of our original readers will certainly be familiar with the geological sequel: SUPERCONTINENT 2: A HAUNTING IN GONDWANALAND. It’s in the later days of Gondwanaland, approximately 130-105 million years ago, that this particular fact (or theory, as the case may be) makes manifest1.

At this point, East Gondwana had separated from Africa and was, essentially, a crazy fusion of Antarctica and Australia. The result was like nothing on earth today. Scientists estimate the average yearly temperature around 40 degrees, ranging low enough to support permafrost, of which there is also evidence. Vast, chilly, forests covered large areas of East Gondwana, and the local dinosaurs evolved to handle strange circumstances1,2. Chief among these would have been the long nights. While the temperatures of Cretaceous Antarctica were higher than those in the area today, the months of darkness, the polar night, remained the same.

To cope with these long periods of cold and dark, some dinosaurs hibernated, others migrated2 – but some decided that sleep was for the weak, and vacations to Boca for retired Jewish ladies, and stuck it out3.

  Leaellynasaura are our poster dinos here: their enlarged eyesockets and signs of year-long metabolic stability are strong evidence that these dinosaurs were able to stay highly active in what even the Starks of Winterfell would consider bad weather2,3. The enlarged eyesockets are typical of creatures with extreme night vision, and their stable metabolisms (shown in bone growth) are a good indicator that they had no hibernation period.

Of course, this brings up an interesting question: if at least some species of dinosaur were well adapted to prolonged periods of cold and dark (thought to be the instruments by which the meteor impact did its deadly work), what really killed them?1

Rich TH, Wagstaff BE, Mason JM, Douthitt CB, Gregory RT, Felton EA (1988) Evidence for low temperatures and biologic diversity in cretaceous high latitudes of Australia. Science, 242:1403-1406

Bell PR, Snively E (2008) Polar Dinosaurs on parade: a review of dinosaur migration. Alcheringa. 32:271-284

Rich TH, Vickers-Rich P (1989) Polar dinosaurs and the biotas of the Early Cretaceous of south-eastern Australia. National Geographic Research, 5:15-53