New Dinosaur Discovered in Antarctica
By JEANNA BRYNER
Posted: 2007-12-11 17:14:14
Filed Under: Science News
(Dec. 11) – A hefty, long-necked dinosaur that lumbered across the Antarctic before meeting its demise 190 million years ago has been identified and named, more than a decade after intrepid paleontologists sawed and chiseled the remains of the primitive plant-eater from its icy grave.
A team led by William Hammer of Augustana College had unearthed the dino fossils in the early 1990s. They found a partial foot, leg and ankle bones on Mt. Kirkpatrick near the Beardmore Glacier in Antarctica at an elevation of more than 13,000 feet (nearly 4,000 meters). It wasn’t until recently, though, that researchers examined the fossils.
“The fossils were painstakingly removed from the ice and rock using jackhammers, rock saws and chisels under extremely difficult conditions over the course of two field seasons,” said Nathan Smith, a graduate student at The Field Museum in Chicago, who along with a colleague describes the dinosaur in the Dec. 5 issue of the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica.
Extreme Dinos
The Antarctic dinosaur was about 20 to 25 feet long (six to about 8 meters) and weighed in at 4 to 6 tons. Smith and co-author Diego Pol, a paleontologist at the Museo Paleontologico Egidio Feruglio in Argentina, determined the remains belong to a new genus and species of dinosaur from the early Jurassic Period.
Here is the full story.
Also found below the ice was the evidence that proved once and for all that aliens used earth to develop outlandishly stupid lifeforms.
In the ice they found remains of direct descendants of Slaoni, Goichi, Roberti, Motterstoni, Ray Gordini and Fred Flinstone.