A bone fragment from a dinosaur, the first ever recovered from Antarctica, has been discovered languishing in a museum drawer, decades after its collection. The specimen, a partial femur from a sauropodomorph, was unearthed during a 2011 expedition but mislabelled and stored away. Its rediscovery, announced today by researchers at the University of Buenos Aires, rewrites the southern continent's paleontological history and underscores the value of revisiting old collections.
Dr. Mariana Jolivet, lead author of the study, described the find as "a serendipitous encounter with a lost piece of Earth's past." The bone dates to the Early Jurassic, approximately 190 million years ago, when Antarctica was part of the supercontinent Gondwana and forested with lush vegetation. The creature, a long-necked herbivore, roamed the same landscapes as its relatives in South Africa and Australia, providing new evidence for faunal connections across the southern landmasses.
The specimen was originally collected by a joint ArgentineSpanish team at Santa Marta Cove on the Antarctic Peninsula. Due to a labelling error, it was catalogued as a marine reptile vertebra and stored in a drawer at the Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid. It took a routine audit by paleontologist Dr. Jorge Fernandez to spot the distinctive bone structure. "I've seen hundreds of dinosaur femurs," he said. "This one was unmistakable."
Antarctica's harsh climate and thick ice cover make fossil hunting extremely challenging. The continent has yielded only a few dinosaur remains, mostly from the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. The new find is particularly significant because it comes from the Early Jurassic, a crucial period for understanding the diversification of sauropodomorphs and the breakup of Gondwana. The bone's preservation allows for detailed CT scanning, which the team plans to use to reconstruct the dinosaur's growth patterns and gait.
This discovery also highlights the alarming rate at which Antarctic fossils are being lost due to climate change. As temperatures rise, previously buried specimens become exposed only to be degraded by freeze-thaw cycles. "We are racing against the clock," Jolivet said. "Each intact fossil we recover is a letter from a world that no longer exists."
The news comes amid a broader reassessment of museum collections worldwide. Many institutions are digitising their archives, and similar "drawer discoveries" have occurred in recent years, including a new species of pterosaur found in a Brazilian museum's mislabeled boxes. The Antarctic find, however, carries a unique weight: it fills a gap in the fossil record that scientists assumed would remain empty for decades.
For now, the lone femur will be transferred to a dedicated Antarctic paleontology collection at the National University of Comahue in Argentina. The team has already begun planning new expeditions to Santa Marta Cove, hoping to find more bones from the same dinosaur or its contemporaries. "This is just the beginning," Jolivet concluded. "Antarctica has many secrets, and they are slowly yielding to the patient researcher."
This story, though long overdue, serves as a potent reminder: science is not always about dramatic breakthroughs in the field. Sometimes, progress comes from a quiet afternoon in a dusty drawer, a careful eye, and the determination to uncover what was hidden in plain sight.
