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Trying to figure out the truth around one of those broad, sweeping statements about the climate during the mesozoic...
Did the Earth have ice caps in the Mesozoic Era?
What was the best part of the Mesozoic Era?
How would you summarize each period in the Mesozoic?
second erathem and era of the Phanerozoic Eonothem and Eon
Factsheet
So, one thing that I hear in a lot of documentary shows (I think I even heard this one line pop up in a relatively recent series) is that during the mesozoic, the weather was on average much warmer than it is today, which fine, BUT... They sometimes even go so far as to say that there definitely was not and below freezing temperatures anywhere on Earth at any point during the entire span on the age of dinosaurs. One very recent one (as in I'm fairly sure the series was made in the last 4-5 years) even made the claim that the ice age that we had immediately prior to the rise of homosapiens was the first ever seen on Earth and that ice had never before had a chance to form on Earth...
But then there's been a lot of paleo art done of things like pachyrhinosaurus being like this thing with a great shaggy covering of downy feathers hanging out in snowy fields. Usually something pretty similar with yutyrannus.
And I get that in paleo art, the depictions are largely based on the artist's ideas of character scenes made for a cool shot rather than complete accuracy.
But I want to know... Were there snowy winters during the age of dinosaurs? Were there parts of the world that were consistently cold or temperate, or at the very least not some binary of the typical depictions of the world either being rainforest or desert?
Portrayals of dinosaurs always seem to be in tropical/subtropical jungle. Was the entire earth like that or were there still areas with different climates?