A single tail vertebra collected on James Ross Island in 1985 has been confirmed as the first dinosaur fossil ever recovered from Antarctica, ending a 40-year period of misidentification. The bone, described in Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, belongs to a titanosaur—a long-necked herbivore—and dates to roughly 82 million years ago. Its confirmation, led by researchers at the British Antarctic Survey and the Natural History Museum in London, adds a second sauropod body fossil to the continent’s extremely sparse dinosaur record and provides a new data point for understanding faunal connections across the ancient supercontinent Gondwana.

The specimen was originally gathered by geologist Mike Thomson during a mapping expedition and catalogued as a large marine reptile. Paleontologist Mark Evans re-examined the material in the BAS collections and, through morphological comparison with more complete sauropod remains, established its dinosaurian affinity. The vertebra’s characteristics place it within the eutitanosaurian lineage, a group well known from Patagonian deposits. This phylogenetic link reinforces the hypothesis that terrestrial vertebrates dispersed between South America and Antarctica while the two landmasses remained connected via the Antarctic Peninsula during the Late Cretaceous.

Separately, Australian paleontologists have identified the oldest known megaraptorid, a large carnivorous dinosaur, from five theropod fossils recovered in Victoria’s Strzelecki and Eumeralla formations. The material, dated to 108–121 million years ago, indicates that these predators reached lengths of six to seven metres and occupied the top trophic level in an ecosystem where carcharodontosaurids played a subordinate role. Viewed from Buenos Aires, the find complements Argentine discoveries by suggesting an early and widespread radiation of megaraptorids across Gondwana, with Australia and South America indirectly linked via Antarctica.

In a separate re-examination of legacy material, an international team has confirmed that the extinct shark Otodus megalodon could attain a length of 24.3 metres, based on a 23-centimetre vertebra found in Denmark in 1978 and thought lost for nearly three decades. The study, published in Palaeontologia Electronica, also identified microscopic scales of a large filter-feeding shark in the surrounding sediment, which the authors interpret as possible remains of the megalodon’s last prey. Meanwhile, Argentine authorities have restricted access to a newly discovered fossilised ecosystem in Río Negro province, where a concentration of dinosaur bones, plant remains, and trace fossils from the final Cretaceous offers an unusually complete snapshot of Patagonian biodiversity just before the mass extinction.

The next milestone will be the detailed stratigraphic and taxonomic analysis of the Río Negro site, expected in a forthcoming paper, while the retreat of Antarctic ice continues to expose new rock surfaces for palaeontological survey.