A dinosaur bone that waited forty years in a drawer

A dinosaur bone sat in a drawer for forty years before anyone realized it was the first ever found in Antarctica. The fossil was a tail bone from a titanosaur, a long necked plant eater. It was collected by geologist Mike Thomson in December 1985 on James Ross Island. He logged it as a large reptile and stored it away. In 2026, paleontologist Mark Evans inspected it and called Paul Barrett at the Natural History Museum. The ten centimeter bone had a hollow structure and a rounded bump. They identified it as a titanosaur that lived 82 million years ago. It was about 23 feet long, small for its family. This find proves that the Antarctic Peninsula once connected South America and New Zealand. Titanosaurs migrated across that land bridge without going through Australia.

License: TypeCram Original