A peculiar fossil, long mislabelled in a museum drawer at the Natural History Museum in London, has been identified as the first dinosaur bone ever recovered from Antarctica. The specimen, a fragment of a femur from a sauropodomorph, was originally collected in 2011 from the Sir David Attenborough Range but remained unclassified until a routine audit by palaeontologists earlier this year.
The bone, roughly the size of a human fist, exhibits the characteristic hollow structure and nutrient foramina of a dinosaur. Dr. Helena Vance, Science Correspondent, spoke with lead researcher Dr. Amelia Hartfield of the University of Cambridge. “We were cataloguing ‘unidentified reptilian material’ when we noticed the internal trabecular pattern. It matched no known marine reptile or pterosaur,” Hartfield explained. “We ran CT scans and compared them to the few Jurassic sauropodomorph specimens from Gondwana. The histology is unambiguous.”
This discovery rewrites the timeline of dinosaur dispersal in the Southern Hemisphere. Sauropodomorphs, long-necked herbivores, were thought to have been confined to temperate latitudes during the Early Jurassic. Antarctica, then part of the supercontinent Gondwana, hosted a milder climate but was still near the South Pole. The bone dates to approximately 190 million years ago, making it one of the oldest dinosaur fossils from the region and the first evidence of terrestrial dinosaurs so far south during that period.
“The implications are significant for understanding polar ecosystems before the breakup of Gondwana,” said Dr. Vance. “We now have direct evidence that large dinosaurs lived at high latitudes during the Jurassic. This forces us to reconsider how they endured seasonal darkness and cold winters.” The fossil also suggests that sauropodomorphs may have migrated across the land bridges connecting Antarctica to Australia and South America, raising questions about their thermal physiology and migratory behaviour.
The misidentification highlights a broader issue within museum collections. “There are thousands of unprocessed fossils in drawers worldwide,” noted Vance. “This find underscores the value of systematic re-examination. We may have more Antarctic dinosaurs waiting to be discovered in storage.”
The discovery is published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. The specimen will be displayed at the Natural History Museum from next month, alongside models of the polar forest that once covered the region. For now, the bone stands as a quiet testament to life at the edge of the world, preserved in a drawer for over a decade.
