Sample FAST-INV files from Section 3.4.2 (p. 37)

Australia's Polar Dinosaurs, Scientfic American (July 1993)
by Patricia Vickers-Rich and Thomas Hewitt Rich

In the Early Cretaceous period, about 100 million years ago, Australia lay alongside Antarctica, which straddled the South Pole as it does today. Australia's southeastern corner, now the state of Victoria, lay well inside the Antarctic Circle. At that time, the region hosted an assemblage of animals and plants that lived under climate conditions having no modern analogue. The average temperature, though low, appears to have been within the temperate range, yet the sun did not shine throughout the long winter.

Many dinosaur lineages survived in this strange environment after they had died out in other places. At least one member of the group evolved an adaptation to the cold and to the dark that is interesting both in itself and for what it tells of the passing of a biological epoch. If global cooling indeed killed the dinosaurs, as many paleontologists have suggested, then Australia's species were the ones most likely to have survived the longest. Did their adaptations to an already marginal climate help them survive a sharp cooling trend, one that caught species living on other continents unprepared?

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