A bone discovered almost 40 years ago during a British scientific expedition has now been officially identified as the first dinosaur fossil ever found in Antarctica. The find is a vertebra from a titanosaur, a group of sauropod dinosaurs that includes some of the largest land animals ever to have lived.
The fossil was discovered in 1985 by British Antarctic Survey (BAS) geologist Mike Thomson during an expedition to James Ross Island on the Antarctic Peninsula. The mission aimed to map the rock strata to make it easier to date future palaeontological finds in the region. At the time, Thomson recorded the bone as belonging to a large reptile, but it is only now that it has been confirmed as a dinosaur.
Palaeontologist Mark Evans, curator of the BAS geological collections, said the fossil caught his eye a few years ago while he was reviewing the organisation’s holdings. “When I first saw this bone in our collections a few years ago, I suspected it was a dinosaur. After examining it more closely, I thought it was probably a caudal vertebra from a titanosaur. When we went back to Mike’s field notebooks, we found he already knew it belonged to a large reptile, so it is very special to be able to confirm his discovery 40 years later,” Evans added in a BAS statement.
