In a discovery that quietly reshuffles the geography of palaeontology, a single dinosaur bone collected from Antarctica nearly a century ago has been found mislabelled in a London museum drawer. The humerus, originally catalogued as a seal fossil, belongs to a plesiosaur, a marine reptile that swam the polar seas when Antarctica was a temperate forest. The find was announced today by the Natural History Museum and the University of Cambridge, who described it as a “testament to the importance of historical collections” and a reminder that British science, often dismissed as fading, continues to deliver fundamental insights into our planet’s deep past.
The bone itself is unremarkable to the untrained eye: a fragment of upper arm, roughly 30 centimetres long, pitted and stained by millennia of ice. But its provenance is extraordinary. It was discovered in 1922 by the Quest expedition, led by Sir Ernest Shackleton on his final voyage. Shackleton died a month before the party returned to Britain and the fossil was promptly forgotten. For 100 years, it sat in a drawer labelled “Phocidae indeterminate” alongside seal bones from the same expedition. It was only when a PhD student, Elaina Roberts, was digitising the collection that she noticed the bone’s internal structure did not match any living mammal.
“It’s a reminder that the most profound discoveries sometimes reveal themselves not in remote field sites but in the dust of old cabinets,” said Dr. Gregor Hutton, lead author of the study published in *Royal Society Open Science*. Indeed, the finding reclaims a thread of British exploration that has long been overshadowed by imperial decline. The Quest expedition was Shackleton’s final push, a private venture funded by British industrialists. Its scientific haul was deemed negligible at the time. Now, nearly a century later, that judgement has been overturned.
The plesiosaur, named *Shackletonius antarcticus* (the species name awaiting formal approval), lived approximately 85 million years ago during the Cretaceous period. At that time, Antarctica was dominated by coniferous forests and seasonal ferns, with a climate similar to modern-day Scotland. The plesiosaurs were apex predators, using their long necks and sharp teeth to hunt fish and squid in the shallow seas that covered much of the continent. The bone itself shows signs of scavenger gnawing, possibly from a large shark. “It’s a fragment of a life, a moment frozen in rock, and now it connects us to a lost world,” said Roberts.
But this is more than a sentimental discovery. The find has immediate scientific value. Plesiosaur fossils from Antarctica are extraordinarily rare: before this, only two partial skeletons had been described, both from the Antarctic Peninsula. The humerus is, in fact, the first definitive dinosaur bone reported from the mainland continent, though plesiosaurs are not strictly dinosaurs (they are marine reptiles). It helps constrain the timing of when Antarctica’s ecosystems shifted from temperate to glacial, a process that began around 34 million years ago as the continent drifted south and the Antarctic Circumpolar Current formed. The bone’s geochemistry suggests the water temperature at the time was around 10 degrees Celsius, consistent with a warming world where ocean temperatures are now rising past that same threshold.
The broader implication is clear: our understanding of Antarctica’s deep past is still incomplete. The continent’s fossil record, buried under kilometres of ice, will only be revealed as that ice retreats. “In a warming world, we will see more of Antarctica’s history,” said Dr. Vance, reflecting on the research. “But the rate at which we lose its present ice sheet should give us pause. The fossils are a window to a previous hothouse climate. We are now engineering a similar transition with far less time to adapt.”
The recovery of the bone from museum obscurity is also a victory for collections-based science, an approach that has fallen out of fashion in an era obsessed with big data and high-tech field expeditions. Yet as Roberts demonstrated, a single fossil, mislabelled for a century, can reanimate a whole narrative. More such finds are likely: the Quest expedition alone collected hundreds of crates of rocks and bones, many of which remain unstudied.
British science, often derided as past its peak, has delivered a quiet but significant contribution to palaeontology. It did not require a large budget or a hyped-up media campaign. It required a meticulous observer, a deep collection, and a willingness to question what was assumed to be known. That is the tradition of Newton and Darwin. And it is still alive, in a dusty drawer in South Kensington.
