:GALLERY [displaystyle:travel] :INFO A bone that waited 40 years to be understood In December 1985, Mike Thomson, a geologist on a British Antarctic Survey expedition, found a fossil on the rocky cliffs of James Ross Island, off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. He thought it was from a large marine reptile, logged it, and put it in a collection drawer. It stayed there, unlabelled and unremarkable, for four decades. Then palaeontologist Mark Evans opened the drawer, looked at the ten-centimetre vertebra under a CT scanner, and saw something nobody had ever found on Antarctica before: a dinosaur. The study was published on 29 June 2026 in Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, and it rewrites the fossil record for the southernmost continent on Earth. :STATS :TIMELINE ๐Ÿฆ•๐ŸงŠ๐Ÿ”ฌ Antarctica, 83 million years ago. It is not ice but lush temperate forest. Long-necked titanosaurs graze amid ferns and conifers. This one dies, perhaps near a river, and its carcass washes out to sea. The carcass settles among ammonites in shallow sediment off the coast. One tail vertebra is preserved in rock as continents slowly drift apart. Gondwana begins its long fracture. 1985-12-01 | Geologist Mike Thomson of the British Antarctic Survey chips a bone out of the Santa Marta Formation on James Ross Island. He logs it as a possible marine reptile fossil and carries it back to the BAS collection in Cambridge. 1986-01-01 | The fossil is catalogued as BAS D.8621.25 and stored in a drawer. No further analysis is conducted. It spends the next four decades beside ammonites and sea-floor specimens. 2024-09-01 | Palaeontologist Mark Evans, reviewing older BAS collections, notices the vertebra has unusual features: a hollow on one end, a round bump on the other, a combination he recognises from titanosaur anatomy. 2025-03-01 | High-resolution CT scans confirm the internal structure. The bone-wall thickness, the ball-and-socket geometry, and the internal chambers are definitively those of a titanosaur sauropod, not a marine animal. 2026-06-29 | The paper is published in Acta Palaeontologica Polonica. BAS D.8621.25 is named the first dinosaur fossil ever collected in Antarctica, predating even Antarctopelta oliveroi, long assumed to hold that title. :NOTE The fossil pre-dates Antarctopelta oliveroi, the armoured ankylosaur found in 1986 and long credited as Antarctica's first dinosaur discovery, because Thomson found this vertebra in December 1985, a full year earlier. The drawer, not the field, was where Antarctica's dinosaur record was waiting. :NOTE.half At 83 million years ago, Antarctica was part of Gondwana and sat much further north than today. Temperatures were warm enough for dense conifer forests. The titanosaur would have shared its world with early flowering plants, large insects, and seabirds fishing in warm coastal waters. | :NOTE.half Titanosauria is the group that includes the largest land animals known to science: Argentinosaurus (estimated 70 tonnes), Patagotitan (69 tonnes), and Dreadnoughtus (65 tonnes). This Antarctic specimen was far smaller, either a juvenile or a dwarf island species, at a modest 6 to 7 metres from snout to tail. :QUOTE [quotetype:plain, subtitle:Study co-author Samantha Beeston ยท June 2026] Its close relatives travelled between South America and Australia via Antarctica. This new find confirms that Antarctica was not an isolated backwater but a busy corridor for the largest animals on Earth. | :NOTE Antarctica has the sparsest dinosaur record of any continent because nearly all its rock is buried under kilometres of ice. As climate change causes the ice to retreat, geologists expect more fossils to surface from the exposed rock of the Antarctic Peninsula, possibly including species entirely new to science. :LINK https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2026/june/first-ever-dinosaur-fossil-discovered-on-antarctica-a-titanosaur.html Natural History Museum: Antarctica's first dinosaur, explained