Tom and Pat Rich once suggested that the polar adaptations of Australian dinos could have made them more resilient during the ‘nuclear winter’ caused by the Chicxulub impact. We don’t have any decent terrestrial sedimentary rocks from the end of the Cretaceous in Australia, however, so we’ve no way of knowing what types of dinos were living here at the time. Here’s my highly speculative take on an end-Cretaceous Australian dinosaur: a hadrosaur, based on similar dinos from South America and Antarctica. The heavy beak is an adaptation for feeding on thorny angiosperms. The spotted pattern is camouflage for a forest understory. The white ‘mittens’ are used for visual signaling with conspecifics.
