We’re living in a golden age of scientists making major discoveries not by tirelessly digging at remote sites, but by digging through old museum drawers full of stuff collected long before anyone had the tools or expertise to appreciate what it really was. Earlier this year, researchers at London’s Natural History Museum identified an ancient snake species from a fossil that had been chilling in a drawer for decades.
It’s happened again, this time with the first dinosaur fossil ever discovered in Antarctica…and then rediscovered in a drawer.
According to a study published in Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, a fossilized tail vertebra collected during a British Antarctic Survey expedition in 1985 has finally been identified as belonging to a titanosaur, a group of huge long-necked herbivorous dinosaurs that included the largest animals ever to walk the Earth.
A Dinosaur Fossil From Antarctica Was Hiding in Plain Sight for Nearly 40 Years
The fossil sat in storage for around 40 years because geologists originally thought it came from some kind of marine reptile. It wasn’t until the British Antarctic Survey collections manager Mark Evans noticed a weird-looking bone while searching through archived specimens — this one looking far more dinosaur-like than the others.
It’s not a mightily impressive bone. It’s only about four inches across and likely belonged to a juvenile or an unusually small titanosaur that was only about 20 to 23 feet long. Yet, its value to paleontological science is incalculable, as it represents the first dinosaur fossil ever recovered from Antarctica, and its discovery helps fill in one of the biggest gaps in the southern hemisphere’s fossil record.
See, 82 million years ago, Antarctica was not a frozen wasteland. It was covered by temperate forests that formed part of the supercontinent Gondwana, which connected South America, Antarctica, and what is now New Zealand. The discovery of this fossil supports the idea that titanosaurs migrated across all these southern landmasses using Antarctica as a land bridge.
The real lesson here is that any Museum workers out there who want to make a big paleontological or archaeological discovery don’t need to beg for funding to dig holes in some far-off locale. Start small by just opening a few drawers to see what as-yet-unidentified discoveries have been collecting dust in a museum for decades.
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