Planteating dinosaur Found In
Plant-Eating Dinosaur Found in Antarctic
Copyright, 1989. The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
LONDON (AP) — Fossil bones of a plant-eating dinosaur found in the Antarctic prove there was a mild climate there 70 million years ago, a British scientist said Thursday.
“We discovered jawbones, much of the vertebral column and the fore limbs, which identify the animal as a bird-hipped dinosaur similar to hypsilophodon, which has been found in Australia, North Amerca, Europe and possibly North Africa,” said Michael Thomson, a scientist who led an expedition to the area.
“There could not have been much ice or snow in the region in those days because the dinosaur was a land animal and it wouldn’t have liked frosty nights.”
He said the dinosaur was about 10 feet long and walked on its hind legs.
Thomson, 46, spoke in a telephone interview from Cambridge, where he is head of geology at the British Antarctic Survey.
He said the expedition also found shells, especially ammonites; fossilized leaves from conifers and broad-leaved trees, as well as tree trunks and ferns, proving there was a food source for the dinosaur.
Thomson said the fossils were found during a six-week geological research cruise this year around the north and east of James Ross Island in British Antarctic Territory, 700 miles from the tip of South America.
He said the dinosaur bones were picked up and given to him by Peter Bengtson, a Swedish paleontologist who joined scientists from Britain, Brazil, Australia and New Zealand for the voyage on the survey ship John Biscoe.
“Three years ago, we found some bones of a marine reptile, the plesiosaur, and as Argentine geologists had found fragments of an armored dinosaur in Antarctica, I knew it was a likely place for other finds,” Thomson said.
The bones were in shallow-water marine rocks and Thomson said the beast probably died on land and floated out to sea before becoming buried and fossilized.
“There were active volcanoes nearby in those times and the area would have been something like Indonesia is today,” he added.
Thomson described the area as several square miles of bare rock with only mosses and lichens — “and not many of those” — growing there now.
The continents in the Southern Hemisphere were once a single land mass that has been named Gondwanaland. About 150 million years ago, it began to split apart, eventually to form South America, Africa, Australia and Antarctica.
The newly found dinosaur would have been one of the last of its kind because the animals were starting to die out about that time, when Antarctica was still close to South America and Australia was only starting to break away, Thomson said.
The bones are now under study at the Natural History Museum in London, where they may eventually be put on display.