Massive cache of 70 million year old fossils found in Antarctica

An international team of scientists hunting for fossils in one of the harshest, most remote places on Earth have made an incredible discovery: a massive cache of dinosaur, bird, and marine reptile remains that date back roughly 70 million years ago to the late Cretaceous Period.

According to Smithsonian.com and the Daily Mail, the researchers made their discovery during an expedition on the James Ross Island region of Antarctic, located several hundred miles south of Chile, in February and March. Most of the creatures were plesiosaurs and mosasaurs, extinct groups of marine mammals, but they also found the remains of early birds and dinosaurs.

“We found a lot of really great fossils,” explained Dr. Steve Salisbury, a researcher from the University of Queensland School of Biological Sciences and one of 12 American, Australian and South Africa on the expedition. “The rocks that we were focusing on come from the end of the age of dinosaurs, so most of them are between 71 million and 67 million years old. They were all shallow marine rocks, so the majority of things we found lived in the ocean.”

“We did find a lot of marine reptile remains, so things like plesiosaurs and mosasaurs – a type of marine lizard made famous by the recent film Jurassic World.,” he added. Dr. Salisbury also told reporters that the team discovered the remains of early ducks that lived during this era, as well as dinosaur remains which they hope to have a paper published on in the near future.

It will take years to comb through the fossils

The researchers began their difficult journey by flying to South America, then embarking on a five-day trek through the Drake Passage – home to some of the roughest seas on Earth, according to Smithonisan.com. Once they reached their destination, they set up camp and spend give weeks hunting for fossils on the Antarctic Peninsula.

“It’s a very hard place to work, but it’s an even harder place to get to,” Dr. Salisbury told ABC News Australia. He had made several past attempts to reach Antarctica, but had previously been blocked by sea ice. “It was so great to finally get there and have a full blown expedition.”

The expedition was well worth the wait, as he and his colleagues managed to recover a collection of ancient dinosaur, reptile, and bird remains that they said could take them at least a year or two to fully catalog and study. The larger bones especially “will need quite a bit of preparation before we can do much research on them,” he said. In the meantime, they will be sent to Chile, and then onto the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

“The diversity and quality of what we found will provide a detailed snapshot of life in Antarctica at the end of the age of dinosaurs,” Dr. Salisbury told the Wall Street Journal. “We went there because it is one of the few parts of Antarctica when in summer, rocks are exposed and for us it is a good spot for us to go because those rocks come from the end of the age of dinosaurs.”

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Image credit: University of Queensland

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