Hunting for dinosaurs on Axel Heiberg Island

When Nunavut’s High Arctic lay further to the South some 250 million years ago, its climate was hot and arid, and huge dinosaurs, like the fierce and towering Tyrannosaurus Rex, roamed what is now chilly Axel Heiberg Island.

“The island has been through a lot of changes,” said Natalia Rybczynski, a researcher at the Canada Museum of Nature in Ottawa. “So, you can start thinking about how changes in the environment affect communities, even of dinosaurs, on a large scale.”

Rybczynski and four other paleontologists who study ancient fossils are spending this month combing the rocks on Axel Heiberg for any remnants of dinosaurs that could be preserved in rock.

Rybczynski says Axel Heiberg’s rocks are the right age to contain dinosaur fossils, but they haven’t been examined closely. This summer, her team wants to do surveys and explore, concentrating on rocks that were created by ancient rivers and have previously yielded plant fossils.

Rybczynski has done summer field work in the High Arctic on three previous occasions. Last year, she went to Bylot Island with colleague Hans Larsson from McGill University, but they didn’t find any exceptional dinosaur fossil deposits. They’re hoping Axel Heiberg will produce more fossils this summer and provide a lifetime of study.

“We’re young researchers,” Rybczynski said. “And we want to make a contribution.”

In their search for dinosaur fossils, they’ll visit several spots in the southern part of the island this summer. Thanks to the Polar Continental Shelf Project, they’ll be hopping by helicopter from area to area.

“We’re trying to cover a lot this year. If we hit the jackpot, though, we’ll have to come back next year because we will only be spending five days in each place,” Rybczynski said.

Her dream is to find a large deposit of fossils. These could show more about what happened during what’s called the Mesozoic Era, 250 million years ago.

“Why we’re interested in this period is that the continent was a little further south and it was actually drifting up and rotating a little bit, so the animals on this continent were being exposed to more and more high-latitude conditions. Maybe they were flexible enough to survive,” Rybczynski said.

By 65 million years ago, however, the age of the dinosaurs abruptly ended.

By 10 to 15 million years ago or more, the climate of the High Arctic was still much, much warmer than today, but the wildlife included animals that looked much like hippos, alligators and turtles.