Scientists have made a surprising discovery — a rare dinosaur fossil from Antarctica that had been sitting unnoticed in a storage drawer for decades.
The bone is from the tail of a titanosaur, a large, long-necked, plant-eating dinosaur. Researchers have not yet pinpointed the exact species the fossil belongs to.
The bone was originally unearthed in 1985 during a research expedition to James Ross Island in Antarctica. Geologist Mike Thomson, who was working alongside the British Antarctic Survey at the time, was charting the area’s rock formations and gathered marine reptile fossils to assist with future geological dating. He logged the find simply as belonging to a large reptile.
Years later, paleontologist Mark Evans came across the bone while going through the British Antarctic Survey’s collections and suspected it could be from a dinosaur. He and a team of researchers studied the bone’s shape and compared it against more complete dinosaur specimens, ultimately confirming the identification. Their findings were published Monday in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica.
Finding dinosaur fossils in Antarctica is extremely uncommon due to the continent’s harsh, ice-covered terrain. However, millions of years ago when this creature roamed the earth, the region looked very different. Study co-author Paul Barrett with the Natural History Museum in London described ancient Antarctica as a “rather different and much more hospitable place than we think of today,” filled with dense forests.
The dinosaur measured roughly 23 feet, or about 7 meters, in length — relatively small for a titanosaur — and may have still been a young animal when it died. Scientists are uncertain how the creature perished, but they believe its body drifted away from the shoreline and eventually sank to the ocean floor, where it became preserved in marine rock over time.
Advances in technology have given modern researchers tools to look inside bones and extract far more detailed information than was possible when the fossil was first collected. Tragically, Thomson passed away in 2020, never knowing the bone he picked up decades earlier turned out to be a dinosaur fossil.
Study co-author Mike Evans with the British Antarctic Survey reflected on the discovery, saying: “If he were still with us, he would be delighted to know what this was.”
