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A dinosaur bone kept in a drawer for nearly four decades has turned out to be the first dinosaur fossil found in Antarctica, according to British scientists.
The fossil was originally collected in 1985 by geologist Mike Thomson during an expedition to James Ross Island, off the Antarctic Peninsula. It had since been stored in the geology collection of the British Antarctic Survey, known as BAS, in Cambridge.
Paleontologists who later examined the bone confirmed that it was a tail vertebra belonging to a titanosaur, a type of dinosaur. The fossil was noticed after BAS Collection Manager Mark Evans looked through thousands of specimens kept in a drawer.
The discovery is now seen as offering new clues about how dinosaurs spread across continents in the Southern Hemisphere.
Evans said the team that first found the fossil probably believed it came from a marine reptile. He also noted that a drawing found next to the specimen recorded the bone as being 10 centimeters wide.
Based on the size of the tailbone, scientists say the Antarctic titanosaur may have been around 7 meters long.
Although the fossil had been collected decades earlier, its identification as a dinosaur bone has now given new importance to a specimen that had remained unnoticed in the BAS collection for years.
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