Forgotten fossil turns out to be first dinosaur bone ever found in Antarctica
Rebecca Morelle, BBC Science Editor, explains why this find is so important
- Published
Do you have stuff lying around in drawers that you just haven't looked at for years?
Maybe that toy you played with two years ago, or a drawing you did and never threw away?
Well, how about this...
A fossil that has spent 40 years lying forgotten in a drawer has been discovered, and you will never guess what it is...a dinosaur bone.
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And it isn't just any dinosaur bone.
It turns out that it is the first dinosaur bone ever found in Antarctica.
The specimen, which was found back in 1985, has been stored away in the geology collection of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) in Cambridge.
However now, after being studied by palaeontologists, it has been confirmed it is a tail bone from a type of dinosaur called a Titanosaur.
The notepad showing the drawing and description of the piece of bone
The group of Titanosaur dinosaurs contains the largest dinosaurs to ever walk the Earth.
The specimen was originally collected on James Ross Island, and its discovery was recorded in a field notebook kept by a geologist called Dr Mike Thomson.
He kept the fossil alongside a tiny neat sketch which was dated 9 December 1985 and was labelled "vertebra of large reptile", noting it was about 10cm wide.
However, the team back then didn't realise quite what this discovery was.
Dr Mark Evans spotted the fossil in the British Antarctic Survey's geology collections
This all changed recently when Dr Mark Evans, collections manager at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) in Cambridge, rediscovered the fossil.
He said: "It's only when you start thinking, 'what's in this drawer?', that sometimes you come across something and you think, 'Ah, this looks interesting'".
And following his find, he called in Prof Paul Barrett from the Natural History Museum (NHM) to confirm his discovery.
"As soon as I saw it, I knew what we were dealing with… it was a dead cert we were dealing with a Titanosaur," said Prof Barrett.
When Titanosaurs inhabited Antarctica 80 million years ago, it would have been covered in forest rather than the ice we find there today
Not only is this fossil from one of the largest dinosaurs to walk the Earth, but it also is special because of where it was found - Antarctica.
Whilst some dinosaur fossils have been found in this remote part of the world in the years after 1985, there haven't been very many.
"It shows that an area that we now think is really uninhabitable was once actually very habitable and had this huge cast of characters living on it," explained Prof Barrett.