The team also used the formation to learn more about the ancient Arctic’s warm and wet climate. By calculating the mean annual precipitation from wood fragments, they found that the Arctic dinosaurs lived in a climate similar to that of modern-day South Florida.
“The temperature was much warmer than it is today, and what’s possibly more interesting is that it rained a lot,” Fiorillo said. “The samples we analyzed indicate it was roughly equivalent to modern-day Miami. That’s pretty substantial.”
(Tom: This adds credence to the hypothesis that a pole shift occurs every 10-11,000 thousand years that causes the equator to go what we presently consider north/south through Antarctica and the Arctic.).