Researchers report that a titanosaur tail vertebra stored for four decades at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge is the first dinosaur bone identified from Antarctica and is now described in a scientific journal this year.The bone was collected by Mike Thomson on James Ross Island in 1985, later cataloged as a large marine reptile, and reexamined by paleontologist Mark Evans, who compared it with known titanosaur material.Paul Barrett at the Natural History Museum in London says the vertebra has features typical of titanosaurs and its size points to an animal roughly seven meters long, probably a juvenile at death.The fossil, preserved in marine rock from the early Campanian about 82 million years ago, suggests the Antarctic Peninsula once supported forests and could help explain links to
Zealandia and South America, though more fossils are required.