A fossil in a drawer turns out to be Antarctica's first dinosaur bone
A fossil that sat unexamined in a museum drawer for four decades has been confirmed as Antarctica’s first dinosaur bone . The roughly 10-centimeter bone was collected on James Ross Island in December 1985 by the late geologist Mike Thomson, who logged it simply as a “vertebra of large reptile.”
Decades later, paleontologist Mark Evans spotted it in the British Antarctic Survey’s collections and suspected it was something more. Analysis identified it as a tail vertebra from a titanosaur — a long-necked, plant-eating dinosaur — estimated at about 7 meters (23 feet) long and dating to around 82 million years ago, in the Late Cretaceous. The findings were published Monday in Acta Palaeontologica Polonica .
The find adds Antarctica to the list of continents with confirmed dinosaur remains and is a reminder that significant discoveries sometimes wait in storage, not in the field — Antarctica’s ice and short collecting seasons make its fossil record especially sparse and hard to build.