That Which Remains... From a Global Extinction

National Science Foundation
Office of Polar Programs
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Posted March 5, 2018

Image: Mike Lucibella, NSF

The fossilized remains of the vertebra and foot of a lystrosaurus, a plant-eating dinosaur which lived about 250 million years ago, embedded in exposed rock high in the mountains of Antarctica.

The find was made by a team of paleontologists, led by Christian Sidor, of the University of Washington, who were working this Southern Hemisphere summer in the Transantarctic Mountains, near the Shackleton Glacier.

They gathered fossil specimens to try to piece together how animals in what is now Antarctica coped with a massive shift in climate. (https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1341304)

Roughly 252 million years ago, a major mass extinction wiped out upwards of 90 percent of species on Earth. At the same time, the Antarctic portion of the supercontinent of Pangea transitioned to a warmer climate and its glaciers melted.

Little is known about the survivors of the extinction in Antarctica, although scientists believe that the continent's high-latitude location shielded it from the worst of the extinction's effects.