ANTARCTICA has yielded its first sauropod fossil. The long-necked plant-eating dinosaurs are already known to have plodded across the six other continents.
The 70 to 80-million-year-old fossil is too incomplete to be given an exact name, but it is distinctive enough to identify as belonging to a branch of sauropods called titanosaurs (Naturwissenschaften, DOI: 10.1007/s00114-011-0869-x).
Ignacio Cerda from the National University of Comahue in Argentina uncovered the fossil on James Ross Island. Excavation is difficult, but the site has yielded other important dinosaur fossils over the past two decades. The beast may have reached Antarctica via an ancient isthmus that linked it to South America. "This specimen is at the highest palaeolatitude of any late Cretaceous sauropod in either hemisphere," says Tom Rich at Museum Victoria in Melbourne, Australia.
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