NOVA “Alaskan Dinosaurs”

Wed. Dec. 27 at 8:30 p.m.

A team of intrepid paleontologists recently discovered a lost world of dinosaurs in the unlikeliest of places — deep in the dark, snowy wilds of northern Alaska. Surprisingly, their wealth of new findings indicate that dinosaurs, far from being confined to the lush tropical jungles and warm swamplands with which we normally associate them, thrived year-round and raised their young in frigid and dark conditions in the far north of the Arctic Circle.

Rappelling down giant ice cliffs bordering the Colville River, the team wields chainsaws to extract fossils frozen into the permafrost. In Denali National Park they use LiDAR technology to map newly found dinosaur tracks indicating that a wide variety of species once flourished there, including herds of duck-bills, horned herbivores, pterosaurs, a new type of velociraptor, and northern relatives of T-rex.