Antarctica divulges new dinosaurs

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In the deep freeze of Antarctica, scientists are finding fossilized remains of large dinosaurs - lumbering plant eaters and the razor-toothed meat eaters - that lived on the icy continent when it was warm and green.

U.S. scientists and the National Science Foundation announced Thursday the discovery of the remains of two previously unknown dinosaurs in Antarctic rock - one a sleek relative of Tyrannosaurus Rex, the other a bulky vegetarian.

The discoveries were made Dec. 7 and Dec. 12 by two teams of paleontologists, working independently, 2,000 miles apart on the coldest continent on Earth.

If Antarctica seems an unlikely place to find the remains of large plant eaters, it's because it would be an unlikely spot - had it not moved.

Scientists say continental drift has shifted all the Earth's continents over the planet's history, and Antarctic was much closer to the Earth's equator millions of years ago. Over the millennia, scientists believe, it drifted south, separated from Australia and is now at the South Pole.

Because it was once in a warmer climate, a continent now 98 percent covered in ice was home to many dinosaurs. In recent years, Antarctica has proved to be a repository for a growing list of dinosaur fossils, the first coming in 1986.

The discoveries have helped bolster the theory of Pangaea, the supercontinent that contained all the world's land masses until it began to break apart about 200-million years ago. Scientists are confident that Africa, South America, Australia and Antarctica once formed one land mass.

In a press conference sponsored by the National Science Foundation, scientists said they believe they have found the fossilized bones of a new species of carnivorous dinosaur, related to the meat-eating Tyrannosaurus rex and the equally voracious but smaller and swifter, velociraptors - both familiar to anyone who saw the film Jurassic Park and its sequels.

The remains found on James Ross Island on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula include fragments of an upper jaw with teeth, isolated individual teeth and most of the bones from both animals' lower legs and feet, said Judd Case, dean of science at Saint Mary's College of California. He said he believed the animal inhabited the area about 70-million years ago when the climate and terrain were similar to today's Pacific Northwest.

This one would have been about eight feet tall, he said, and would have weighed perhaps 300 pounds. It would have lived in the Cretaceous Period, which lasted from 144-million to 65-million years ago. Case led the research team with James Martin, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. Just a few years ago, in 1998 and 1999, Martin found the remains of giant marine reptiles that lived in Antarctic waters about 80-million years ago. The mosasaurus was a huge, ferocious-looking swimming reptile, but technically not a dinosaur.

A mosasaurus "looks like a giant alligator with fins," Martin said in 1999. Its head could be 6 feet long and the mouth was filled with sharp, serrated teeth.

"A great discovery," he said of the Dec. 7 find.

"Antarctica still holds many surprises for us," Case said.

While Case and Martin were unearthing their meat-eater on the Antarctic Peninsula, another group of researchers was working in harsh conditions on an inland mountaintop. Now known as Mt. Kirkpatrick, the area was once a soft riverbed, before millions of years of tectonic activity pushed it upward.

Passing time while waiting for some rock to be cleared at an excavation site, team leader William Hammer, an NSF funded researcher from Augustana Collge in Rock Island, Ill., told a mountain guide to keep his eyes open.

"I jokingly said to him, "Keep your eyes down, look for weird things in the rock,' " Hammer said. "He marked four or five things that he thought were odd, including some fossilized roots. But I realized that one of these things was bone: part of a huge pelvis . . ."

"Kind of wimpy for a sauropod," Hammer said, since some reached 100 feet. But, at 190-million years "it is a very old dinosaur," and the reaction to the find "was closed to pandemonium among the group."

"This site is so far removed geographically from any site near its age, it's clearly a new dinosaur to Antarctica," Hammer said. "We have so few dinosaur specimens from the whole continent, compared to any other place, that almost anything we find down there is new to science."

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