Published 21.40
The anonymous fossil lay forgotten in a chest of drawers for 40 years. Now it has turned out to be Antarctica’s first discovered dinosaur bones, the BBC reports.
The fossil was found in 1985, but since no one knew what it was, it was put in a box at the Cambridge institute BAS (British Antarctic Survey). There it remained until recently, when paleontologists began to examine the fossil.
Now they can confirm that it is a tailbone from a titanosaurus, a genus of the largest dinosaurs that ever walked the earth.
– As soon as I saw the fossil, I knew what we were dealing with, says Professor Paul Barrett at the Natural History Museum in London to the BBC.
According to Barrett, the discovery provides new clues about how the dinosaurs lived in a part of the Earth where very few fossils have been found.
