Plant-Eating Dinosaur Found in Antarctic

Copyright, 1989. The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

LONDON (AP) -- Fossil bones of a plant-eating dinosaur found in the

Antarctic prove there was a mild climate there 70 million years ago, a

British scientist said Thursday.

"We discovered jawbones, much of the vertebral column and the fore

limbs, which identify the animal as a bird-hipped dinosaur similar to

hypsilophodon, which has been found in Australia, North Amerca, Europe

and possibly North Africa," said Michael Thomson, a scientist who led an

expedition to the area.

"There could not have been much ice or snow in the region in those

days because the dinosaur was a land animal and it wouldn't have liked

frosty nights."

He said the dinosaur was about 10 feet long and walked on its hind

legs.

Thomson, 46, spoke in a telephone interview from Cambridge, where he

is head of geology at the British Antarctic Survey.

He said the expedition also found shells, especially ammonites;

fossilized leaves from conifers and broad-leaved trees, as well as tree

trunks and ferns, proving there was a food source for the dinosaur.

Thomson said the fossils were found during a six-week geological

research cruise this year around the north and east of James Ross Island

in British Antarctic Territory, 700 miles from the tip of South America.

He said the dinosaur bones were picked up and given to him by Peter

Bengtson, a Swedish paleontologist who joined scientists from Britain,

Brazil, Australia and New Zealand for the voyage on the survey ship John

Biscoe.

"Three years ago, we found some bones of a marine reptile, the

plesiosaur, and as Argentine geologists had found fragments of an

armored dinosaur in Antarctica, I knew it was a likely place for other

finds," Thomson said.

The bones were in shallow-water marine rocks and Thomson said the

beast probably died on land and floated out to sea before becoming

buried and fossilized.

"There were active volcanoes nearby in those times and the area would

have been something like Indonesia is today," he added.

Thomson described the area as several square miles of bare rock with

only mosses and lichens -- "and not many of those" -- growing there now.

The continents in the Southern Hemisphere were once a single land

mass that has been named Gondwanaland. About 150 million years ago, it

began to split apart, eventually to form South America, Africa,

Australia and Antarctica.

The newly found dinosaur would have been one of the last of its kind

because the animals were starting to die out about that time, when

Antarctica was still close to South America and Australia was only

starting to break away, Thomson said.

The bones are now under study at the Natural History Museum in

London, where they may eventually be put on display.