Science / Medicine : Dinosaurs Roamed Antarctica

Researchers also announced last week that they had discovered dinosaur fossils in the southern part of Antarctica, indicating that it had a temperate climate 200 million years ago. Since then, the continent has broken away from other land masses, moved to the South Pole and become permanently icebound.

Paleontologist William R. Hammer of Augustana College in Rock Island, Ill., said that he and his team have recovered a fossilized skull, a shoulder blade, vertebrae, some ribs and four to five limb bones from one dinosaur on a mountainside 400 miles from the South Pole.

“From the shape of the skull and the build of the femur, it looks like a moderate-sized herbivore,” or plant-eater, said Hammer. The animal, he said, was about 25 feet long, which makes it moderate in size, as dinosaurs go.

“This is the first dinosaur find on the Antarctic mainland,” he said in an announcement by the National Science Foundation.