NOVA: "Alaskan Dinosaurs" (WGBH Educational Foundation, PBS, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The next PBS science-themed show was a NOVA episode from 2022 called “Alaskan Dinosaurs.” The story really began in 1961, when a geologist leading an excavation party in Alaska’s North Slope (the coldest part of what’s already America’s coldest state) for an oil company spotted fossilized remains of what turned out to be bones from previously unknown dinosaur species. This sparked a major controversy in the paleontological community because it had been previously assumed that dinosaurs were giant reptiles, who like today’s reptiles were cold-blooded and therefore couldn’t last an ultra-cold climate like Alaska’s, especially in the wintertime. The show followed a team of paleontologists exploring the North Slope wilderness in the depths of winter on an ultra-strict time schedule dictated by the inexorable progress of the area’s climate to colder and colder temperatures and 24-hour nightfall. Their strategy was to cut up the layers of sediment that had covered up where the bones were first discovered in 1961, ship them back to warmer and more hospitable climes farther south and analyze them at leisure. One particularly hot-looking man interviewed in the program was science writer Riley Black, who attracted me with the purple shock in his shoulder-length hair, the body art on his forearms and the stud earrings. At first the paleontologists leading the study thought that the dinosaurs had migrated to warmer areas and spent the winters there, but fragments of baby dinosaur teeth forced them to conclude that these species of dinosaurs took too long for their young to mature to be capable of migrating in herds. Instead they had figured out how to do what modern-day bears and other mammals do to make it through the winter: they had learned to burrow and spend the winter hibernating.

This also begged the question of what did the herbivorous (vegetarian) dinosaurs eat once the native trees shed their leaves for the winter. A researcher named Karen Chin from the University of Colorado at Boulder came up with an intriguing answer based on her study of coprolite. “Coprolite” is essentially science-speak for “fossilized dinosaur shit,” and what she found in the Alaskan dino-dung was remnants of lignite. Lignite is the stuff wood is made out of, and she theorized that the dinosaurs spent their winters (when they weren’t hibernating) eating rotting bits of dead trees and extracting protein from the insects who were living in, colonizing and also eating the dead trees. (So these types of dinosaurs weren’t totally vegetarian, at least not in the human sense.) “Alaskan Dinosaurs” was an unusually interesting nature documentary and NOVA episode that touches on the revolution in dinosaur thinking over the last 50 years or so. Until then dinosaurs had been assumed to be scaled-up versions of modern-day reptiles (like lizards or snakes) – the word “dinosaur” comes from the Greek for “terrible lizard” – but the more recent thinking is that dinosaurs were more like warm-blooded birds than cold-blooded reptiles. The people behind this show even argued that these dinosaurs probably had skin coverings that looked and acted more like feathers than scales and fulfilled the same function bird feathers do: to help keep the animals warm. Of course we have no idea what dinosaurs really looked like because our only evidence of their existence is fossilized bones, from which we have to make hopefully educated guesses about the appearance of their skins.