A fossil discovered in a drawer of the Natural History Museum in London has been identified as the first dinosaur specimen ever collected from Antarctica. The remains, originally excavated in 1910 during Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova expedition, were misfiled and forgotten for over a century. They belong to a new genus of early Jurassic sauropodomorph, a long-necked herbivore that roamed the Antarctic peninsula approximately 190 million years ago. The find underscores both the enduring legacy of British polar exploration and the accelerating pace of Antarctic palaeontology, as researchers race to understand how life adapted to the continent's harsh climates before deep freeze set in.
The fossil, a partial femur and several vertebrae, was extracted from a layer of sedimentary rock on the Beardmore Glacier by Scott's team. It was shipped to London alongside geological samples and catalogued under a mislabelled entry. Dr Helena Vance, a geoscientist at the University of Cambridge, led the re-examination during a project to digitise the museum's polar collection. 'It sat in a drawer for 112 years, ignored because the labels were faded and the bones were fragmentary,' she said. 'But these fragments are revolutionary. They confirm that dinosaurs thrived in latitudes that today are covered by ice sheets kilometres thick.'
Analysis places the dinosaur near the base of the sauropodomorph family tree, a group that includes the giant Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus. The specimen, yet to be formally named, is smaller than its later relatives, about the size of a cow. It walked on two legs but could switch to four. The find extends the known range of early sauropodomorphs by several thousand kilometres southward, challenging assumptions about their habitat preferences. 'We used to think these animals were restricted to low-latitude floodplains,' explained Dr Vance. 'But this fossil shows they were versatile, capable of surviving in polar forests with seasonal darkness and frost.'
The discovery arrives amid a renaissance in Antarctic palaeontology. Over the past decade, teams from the UK, US and Argentina have uncovered numerous dinosaur fossils on the continent, including ankylosaurs, hadrosaurs and the massive carnivore Cryolophosaurus. The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) plans a major expedition next summer to the Transantarctic Mountains, targeting rock formations of similar age to the Scott specimen. 'The UK holds the historical keys to Antarctic geology,' said BAS director Professor Dame Jane Francis. 'But we are also leading the modern push using satellite imagery and ice-penetrating radar to locate new fossil sites.'
This fossil's long confinement to a museum drawer highlights the need for thorough auditing of historical collections. Many specimens from early polar expeditions remain unexamined. Dr Vance's team has already identified two additional bone fragments in the same drawer that may belong to other species. 'We are essentially doing climate detective work,' she said. 'Each bone tells a story of how life adapted to a warming Earth. Antarctica's past might hold clues to its future.'
The specimen will be displayed at the Natural History Museum from next week, alongside Scott's original field notes. For a scientific community battered by funding cuts and Brexit uncertainties, the discovery offers a rare narrative of triumph. It is a reminder that British science, despite its challenges, still dominates the race to understand the last continent.
