How Antarctic dinosaurs can solve Earth’s greatest mysteries

Paleontologists from across the world are following a hot lead to the coldest place on Earth—Antarctica—all in hopes of finding fossil clues that resolve some of prehistory’s greatest mysteries.

Millions of years ago, Antarctica was part of the supercontinent Gondwana, and was actually a warm, lush area that supported an incredible amount of life. Thanks to continental drift, Antarctica relocated to a more southerly location—meaning that a potential goldmine of flora and fauna fossils from when dinosaurs roamed the Earth are now buried under ice and snow.

The expedition, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, begins today, and will rely on an icebreaker and helicopters to reach otherwise inaccessible locations—namely, James Ross Island and other islands near it, some of the few locations in Antarctica where fossil-bearing rocks can be readily accessed.

How extinction may have affected polar ecosystems

While the general goal is to learn more about prehistory, the team—scientists from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, University of Texas at Austin, Ohio University, the American Museum of Natural History, and other collaborators from across the U.S., Australia, and South Africa—has a few more specific interests in mind.

“Ninety-nine percent of Antarctica is covered with permanent ice,” said Matthew Lamanna, paleontologist and assistant curator at the Carnegie Museum, in a statement. “We’re looking for fossils of backboned animals that were living in Antarctica at the very end of the Age of Dinosaurs, so we can learn more about how the devastating extinction that happened right afterward might have affected polar ecosystems.”

Moreover, they hope to uncover what role Antarctica played in the evolution of vertebrate animals (ones with a backbone, including birds and mammals), which is an enormous unsolved mystery. To accomplish this, they’re looking for fossils dating from 100 million to 40 million years ago, or from the Cretaceous to the Paleogene, which contains fossils of the transition from the Age of Dinosaurs to the Age of Mammals.

“What I hope to achieve this time is to discover the first evidence of mammals in the Cretaceous of Antarctica, species that lived at the end of the Age of Dinosaurs,” said Ross MacPhee, a curator and professor at the American Museum of Natural History. “If we can find them, they will have a lot to tell us about whether any evolutionary diversifications took place in Antarctica, and whether this was followed by species spreading from there to other portions of the ancient southern supercontinent Gondwana.”

Also looking for evidence of asteroid impact

Besides searching out the origins of mammals and birds, some team members will be examining the rocks to help decipher what the environment was like in the transition from the Cretaceous to the Paleogene. Geologists hope some of the rocks date to roughly 66 million years ago—and therefore capture evidence of the asteroid impact that killed all non-avian dinosaurs.

Either way, the team is wandering into little-explored territory—meaning that discoveries could be ripe for the picking.

“It’s impossible not to be excited to reach remote sites via helicopter and icebreaker to look for dinosaurs and other life forms from over 66 million years ago,” said Julia Clarke, a professor and paleontologist at the UT Austin Jackson School of Geosciences. “The Earth has undergone remarkable changes, but through all of them, life and climate and geologic processes have been linked. A single new discovery from this time period in the high southern latitudes can change what we know in transformative ways.”

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