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NOVA: Alaskan Dinosaurs

A herd of duck-billed dinosaurs in Alaska's arctic winter 70 million years ago.

Wednesday, June 18, 2025 at 10 p.m. on KPBS TV / PBS app

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 indicates 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.

NOVA: Fossilized Dung Reveals Clues About Dinosaurs' Diet

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.

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Learn more about the dinosaurs that thrived in the Arctic on NOVA "Alaskan Dinosaurs."

NOVA: Alaskan Dinosaurs: Preview

Watch On Your Schedule: This episode will be available to stream for a limited time with the PBS app. (after this encore the film expires July 17)

NOVA: Did Some Dinosaurs Breed in the Arctic?

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