The first dinosaur bone discovered in Antarctica is an unassuming-looking relic that was left in a drawer for forty years.
The specimen was hidden away in the geology collection of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) in Cambridge after it was discovered in 1985, but the team that made the discovery was unsure of what it was.
Palaeontologists have now examined the fossil and determined that it is a tail bone from a kind of dinosaur known as a titanosaur, which included the biggest dinosaurs to have set foot on Earth.
The finding contributes to our understanding of how these animals survived in an area of the planet with a limited fossil record.
Among the thousands of specimens returned from Antarctic expeditions over the years, Dr. Mark Evans, the collections manager at BAS, recently noticed the fossil. “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’,” he said.
Geologist Dr. Mike Thomson had a field diary in which he documented the specimen’s first collection on James Ross Island.
He wrote “vertebra of large reptile” next to a small, tidy sketch of the fossil dated December 9, 1985, and noted that it was roughly 10 cm broad.
According to Evans, the team who discovered it most likely believed the fossil belonged to a sea reptile.
Prof. Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum (NHM) was called in by him to verify his findings. “Although it’s not too much to look at, it actually has a really distinctive shape,” Barrett said, displaying the fossil.
He indicated a hollow on one end of the fossil, then flipped it over to show a rounded protrusion on the other. From head to tail, a sequence of ball-and-socket joints is formed by the alignment of the vertebrae.
“As soon as I saw it, I knew what we were dealing with… it was a dead cert we were dealing with a Titanosaur,” he replied. “This is a combination of features that’s completely unique to these types of dinosaurs.”
There are currently over 100 known species of titanosaurs worldwide.
They are all four-legged plant eaters with long counterbalancing tails and very long necks that allow them to reach up into trees. The largest Titanosaurs weighed over 60 tons and were over 115 feet (35 meters) in length.
Scientists calculate that the Antarctic Titanosaur was roughly 23 feet (7 meters) long based on the size of this tail bone.
The long-forgotten fossil now has a significant role in Antarctic expedition history. In the years after 1985, a few more dinosaur fossils were discovered in this isolated region of the globe.
Palaeontologists find it difficult to work in Antarctica because the ice hides the prehistoric record in the underlying rock.
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