People gather at the exhibit of a titanosaur cast in 2016 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Scientists have recognized the first dinosaur fossil found in Antarctica — a tail bone from a titanosaur — after it spent 40 years in a drawer. File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI | License Photo
For about 40 years, an ordinary-looking fossil sat in a drawer in the geology collection of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge. Today, it’s finally being recognized and described for what it is — the first dinosaur fossil found in Antarctica.
Mark Evans, the BAS collection manager, told BBC News that he found the nearly 4-inch-wide fossil among many other items collected on Antarctic missions over the decades.
“It’s only when you start thinking, ‘what’s in this drawer,’that sometimes you come across something and you think, ‘ah, this looks interesting,’ ” Evans said.
According to a field notebook in the collection, a team collected the fossil in December 1985 on James Ross Island. Geologist Mike Thomson drew a sketch of the bone and wrote “vertebra of large reptile,” next to it, Evans said.
In a paper published in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, scientists have now identified the fossil as the tail bone from a titanosaur, one of the largest dinosaurs to ever live.
The paper noted that Antarctica has a sparse dinosaur record, much more so than other continents, and that sauropods like the titanosaur are “exceptionally rare.”
“Size comparisons indicate that the individual in question was small for a titanosaur, possibly reflecting immaturity or a genuinely small-bodied form,” the paper said. “This discovery represents only the second sauropod body fossil known from Antarctica, although it was the first dinosaur bone to be collected from the continent.”
Titanosaurs reached weights of more than 15 tons, Phys.org reported. This titanosaur was likely only 20 to 23 feet long, however.
“At first glance, this appears to be an unremarkable fossil, but it holds an important place in the history of Antarctic exploration as the first dinosaur fossil found on the continent,” said Paul Barrett, merit researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, in the Phys.org article. “At the time this animal lived, we know Antarctica would have been covered in lush temperate forest, providing ample food for large herbivores.”
“There are likely many more dinosaurs to be discovered on the continent,” Barrett said. “As climate change causes ice to retreat, we may indeed find further evidence of this past biodiversity.”
