POLAR winters weren’t as cold in the Cretaceous as they are today, but they were long and dark. That has posed a puzzle: how did small dinosaurs living in polar areas survive the lean months when little food was available? The discovery of three fossil burrows in south-eastern Australia suggests they may have dug in for the winter.
Fossils from “Dinosaur Cove” in Victoria show that small plant-eating dinosaurs called hypsilophodontids were common in the area about 110 million years ago, a time when it was within what is today’s Antarctic circle. The region was forested, with temperatures 6 or 7 °C warmer than such latitudes are today. But with the sun…
