First Antarctic dinosaur bone identified after 40 years

A fossil that sat forgotten in a museum drawer for four decades has been identified as the first dinosaur bone ever discovered in Antarctica. The tail vertebra, originally collected in 1985, has been confirmed to belong to a Titanosaur, a group of enormous, long-necked herbivores that were among the largest animals to ever walk the Earth.

The bone was unearthed on James Ross Island during a British Antarctic Survey expedition. The geologist who found it, Dr. Mike Thomson, recorded the discovery in his field notebook on December 9, 1985, sketching the specimen and describing it as a "vertebra of a large reptile," approximately 10 centimeters wide. The team at the time suspected it might be from a marine reptile, leading to its storage among thousands of other specimens at the BAS headquarters in Cambridge.

Its significance remained unrecognized until recently, when BAS collections manager Dr. Mark Evans rediscovered it while reviewing the archive. Evans noted the bone's distinctly dinosaur-like appearance and sought a second opinion from Professor Paul Barrett, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London.

Barrett confirmed the identification, pointing to the...