NSF PR 98-7 - February 6, 1998
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New Dinosaur Finds in Antarctica Paint Fuller Picture
of Past Ecosystem
A team of Argentinean and U.S. scientists has found
fossils of a duck-billed dinosaur, along with remains
of Antarctica's most ancient bird and an array of
giant marine reptiles, on Vega Island off the eastern
side of the Antarctic Peninsula.
The tooth of a duck-billed dinosaur, or hadrosaur,
was found in sands about 66-67 million years old,
from the Cretaceous period (about 1-2 million years
before the asteroid impact that contributed to the
extinction of the dinosaurs). The team that found
the fossils is headed by Sergio Marenssi of the Instituto
Antartico Argentino and Judd Case of St. Mary's College,
California.
"This is the first duck-billed dinosaur to be found
outside the Americas," said Mike Woodburne, University
of California-Riverside paleontologist who is part
of the project. "This gives us more support for the
idea of a land bridge between South America and Antarctica
at that time." The land bridge was used not only by
dinosaurs but probably also by marsupial mammals dispersing
from the Americas to Australia via Antarctica.
The hadrosaurs are a distinctive group of American
dinosaurs, known for fancy crests on their skulls
with networks of passageways that may have been used
for vocalization and that may suggest the animals
were social. Some stood perhaps 20 feet tall.
"This find allows us to paint a much fuller picture
of what life was like in Antarctica at the time,"
commented Scott Borg, NSF program manager for Antarctic
geology and geophysics. "The climate was obviously
very different when these animals lived. There must
have been a lot of vegetation to support these large
plant-eaters. The find implies a complicated and robust
ecosystem."
The region around Vega Island is extremely rich in
both terrestrial and marine fossils, and the only
such fossil trove in Antarctica to span the boundary
of the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods, the time when
the dinosaurs were wiped out.
The team also recovered a four-centimeter-long piece
of a foot bone from what appears to be Antarctica's
most ancient bird yet found. Also collected were numerous
partial skeletons of gigantic marine reptiles called
plesiosaurs and mosasaurs. According to James Martin,
a South Dakota School of Mines paleontologist on the
dig, these specimens included several juveniles which
are very rare in the fossil record.
The group of paleontologists also includes members
from the Smithsonian Institution and Argentina's Museo
de la Plata.
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