Why researches don’t find frozen dinosaurs? We often find the rests of mammoths or other mammals but never of dinosaurs and similars.
I wonder if this is due to the location, eg no dinosaur could survive cold climate, or just they are so sparse and the ice so thick that we didn’t found them yet. Maybe the artic wasn’t inhabited at the time? It would be weird, penguins are there now so some must have adapted somehow.
In: Biology
The current glaciation period on Earth only started about 2.4 million years ago. This is the cycle that causes the ice ages and results in large ice sheets forming over much of the northern hemisphere.
While Antarctica froze around 34 million years ago.
Prior to that the Earth overall was much warmer and permanent ice and glaciers either didn’t exist, or didn’t last long.
Dinosaurs went extinct 65 million year ago. So if there was any permanent ice in the dinosaur era it’s long since melted.
By comparison that frozen mammoth they found in Siberia was only around 22,000 years old which geologically speaking was like an hour ago.
Vastly different timelines.
Dinosaurs lived tens to hundreds of millions of years ago, mammoths lived tens of thousands of years ago.
In those millions of years the continents have moved around. The glaciers we see now are not the glaciers they had then. They melted, reformed, probably lots of times.
So there aren’t any dinosaur-glaciers around, still. Just dinosaur-rocks.
The planet’s polar ice isn’t permanent. [The oldest ice known is 4.6 million years old.](https://polarjournal.ch/en/2024/04/24/new-record-4-6-million-year-old-ice-found-in-antarctica/#:~:text=The%20record%20for%20the%20oldest,from%20before%20the%20ice%20age.) Ice ages come and go, and there have been periods of time when the whole planet was very warm and there was very little ice. Sea levels were very high.
[There were dinosaurs in antarctica,](https://www.bbcearth.com/news/when-dinosaurs-roamed-antarctica) , because the planet was very warm at that time. The continents weren’t exactly where they are now, but it was far enough south that they had large eyes to cope with long months with no sun.
>Maybe the artic wasn’t inhabited at the time?
The northern ice cap floats on the ocean. There are a few islands under it, and it is kind of stuck to Greenland and Siberia, but there is mostly water under there. Nuclear submarines patrol there, nothing but another submarine can find them.
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