Alaskacephale

Alaskacephale is an extinct genus of pachycephalosaurid, a group of dome-headed, herbivorous ornithischian dinosaurs, that lived during the Maastrichtian stage of the Late Cretaceous period in what is now northern Alaska.

Alaskacephale coexisted with dinosaurs like the ceratopsian Pachyrhinosaurus, ornithopod Edmontosaurus, and tyrannosaurid Nanuqsaurus in addition to mammals like Unnuakomys.

[2][3] The fossil was then deposited in the University of Alaska Museum and described in 2005 by Roland Gangloff and colleagues as belonging to a pachycephalosaurine closely related to, and possibly, Pachycephalosaurus.

The genus name comes from Alaska, the state the holotype (name-bearing specimen) was found in, and cephale, from the Greek kephale meaning "head".

[3][4] No postcranial fossils belonging to Alaskacephale have been found, though there are well-preserved skeletons of the related Stegoceras, Homalocephale, and Prenocephale.

Based on these taxa, Alaskacephale had a short neck, tiny forelimbs, long hindlimbs, and a thick, rodlike tail for balance.

[3][4] Alaskacephale was a member of the group Pachycephalosauria, a family of thick-skulled, herbivorous, bipedal dinosaurs that lived during the Cretaceous period in Asia and North America.

In contrast to the contemporary large herbivores Edmontosaurus and Pachyrhinosaurus, which preferred coastal lowland and upland environments respectively, Nanuqsaurus appears to have been fairly ubiquitous throughout the Prince Creek landscape.

[18] As well as this, several mammals, including the metatherian Unnuakomys,[19] the eutherian Gypsonictops, both an unnamed and named multituberculate, the latter being Cimolodon, and finally an indeterminate marsupial.

Interestingly, due to the cooler conditions of this habitat, many otherwise common ectothermic clades lack representation entirely in the Prince Creek Formation, suggesting that all the animals that did thrive in these extreme latitudes were indeed endotherms to some degree.

A herd of P. perotorum resting next to contemporaneous paleofauna from the Prince Creek Formation
A herd of Pachyrhinosaurus resting next to contemporaneous paleofauna from the Prince Creek Formation