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			FOSSILS/ARTIFACTS
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ARTIFACTS
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QUESTION: What kind of artifacts have been found at Antarctica? 
What did you do with them? 

ANSWER from Diana W. Freckman on Feb. 8 1995
I am not sure exactly what kind of artifacts you are talking about, but 
because things decompose so very slowly there, all of the great early 
explorers left everything and we can still see it. For example, at 
McMurdo, Captain Scott's hut is still there, complete with the food he 
and his men left (after all, Antarctica is just one big freezer, so you can 
simply open the "door" and everything is just like in your freezer!).The 
Hut is a Antarctic Historic Landmark, so we can only enter on certain 
days to take pictures and to walk around. In many ways it is much 
better than a museum because the hut is actually where they lived, with 
their wooden furniture, their tins of beans, their calendars on the wall--
really amazing. Even their boots! Out at Cape Royds there is another 
hut, one that Shackleton and his group used. They had ponies, and 
because there is so little decomposition, you can still see pony poop 
after 80 years! It is a really neat hut with their microscopes and long 
table where they had dinner, and again, their food and supplies.
 
We just leave everything as is!

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FINDING FOSSILS
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QUESTION: How do you dig into the ice and rock to find fossils, and 
how old are the fossils you have found?

ANSWER from Scott Robinson and Craig Mundell on December 28, 
1994 
The fossils are found in sedimentary rocks exposed at the surface 
(above the snow). The easiest way to find them is to look at rocks that 
have fallen off of an outcrop or use a rock hammer to whack off some 
fresh rock. Most of the fossils are found in the shale layers.

In general, the fossils we are collecting are around 250 million years 
old. We are collecting plant fossils (leaves, hopefully, some stems, and 
reproductive structures).

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QUESTION: How do the researchers down there know where to start 
to look for fossils in the ice?

ANSWER from Deane Rink
Most fossils that are sought down here are not looked for under the ice 
per se, but instead are searched for in rock outcrops that stick up above 
the ice, as with the Transantarctic Mountains bursting through the 
permanent ice cover. Sometimes they are found in the Dry Valleys 
where no or very little ice remains, or are sought, as is the case with 
Paul Berkman, on the exposed former beaches of McMurdo Sound 
where terraces remain just above the current sea ice level. Berkman 
searches for fossilized mollusks (clams and scallops) because the 
structure and chemistry of these deposits help him reconstruct the early 
climate history of the region. Another researcher, Dave Harwood, 
seeks microscopic marine fossils in the Transantarctic Mountains 
because they allow him, on a much deeper time scale than Berkman, 
reconstruct climate histories of not just the continental margins, but of 
the entire Antarctic land mass.

Since the ice sheet, especially the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, can be up 
to two miles thick, seeking clues to early life forms underneath it is 
beyond our present technological reach.

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QUESTION: How can fossils be found with so much ice?

ANSWER: 
You can't find fossils under all that ice, since as you probably read, it 
is over two miles thick in some places! It is about 9000 feet thick at the 
South Pole! Luckily for the paleontologist and geologist, about 5% of 
the continent of Antarctica is NOT covered with ice. It is in these 
exposed areas of rock that the fossils have been found. In many cases 
the outcrops of rock are ridges or mountain tops that stick up through 
the ice. Check your map of Antarctica for the Transantarctic Mountain 
Range. Several major amphibian (Lystrasaurus) and reptilian fossils 
have been found in those mountains near the Beardmore Glacier, I 
believe.

Other animal fossils have been found in what is called Tropical 
Antarctica, which are the islands off the coast and part of the Antarctic 
Peninsula (south of South America) that are above the Antarctic 
Circle. It is a little warmer in this area, thus the name. Anyway, 
sometime finding fossils is just pure luck. On one of these islands, 
Seymore Island, a marsupial jaw bone was found. As I recall, the 
paleontologist who found it was on the way back to his camp after 
having a frustrating field day (and field season for that matter) with 
nothing in hand. He stopped to take a rest, sat down on a rock, put his 
hand back and right under it was the jaw bone, a major find in piecing 
together the fossil record of the Antarctic and the surrounding 
continents!

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DINOSAURS
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QUESTION: What kind of dinosaur bones have been found in the 
Antarctic? How are they preserved?

ANSWER from Deane Rink on December 16, 1994
There may have been many recent discoveries, but the first dinosaur 
fossil found in the Antarctic was found by a now-retired paleontologist 
from the Museum of Northern Arizona named Edwin Colbert.

Any good library would have his popular books, one or two of which 
mention his Antarctic expeditions. Colbert and his colleagues found 
Lystrosaurus fossils in the Coalsack Bluff region of the Transantarctic 
Mountains.

Lystrosaur was an early reptile ancestor of the dinosaurs we all know 
and love, probably from the Permian Age. There have been other 
dinosaur discoveries subsequent to Colbert's, and if you saw Program 
#2 of "Live From Antarctica," entitled "Antarctica: Then and Now," 
you saw Bill Stout's paintings of dinosaurs roaming a tropical 
Antarctic some 200 million years ago.

ANSWER from Terry Trimingham on January 4, 1995
There have been a number of dinosaurs found in the Antarctic, and I 
am sure that you will be able to find reference books that can tell you 
about them. At the moment there aren't any scientists here researching 
dinosaurs so I have no one to ask your question to.

I do know that a few years ago there was a Dr. William Hammer here 
in McMurdo, and he and his team found a number of dinosaur fossils 
from the Jurassic Period (between 200 million and 175 million years 
ago) that had never been discovered before.

Dr. Hammer's group found a kind of theropod (related to 
Tyrannosaurus Rex, a carnivorous bipedal dinosaur) that had a crest 
running perpendicularly across the skull. The also found the foot of a 
prosauropod dinosaur, and the arm of a pterosaur (a flying reptile).

In the Jurassic Period (long ago), the climate of Antarctica was much 
warmer, and the continent itself could have been located farther from 
the South Pole, although it was probably still within the Antarctic 
circle. 

The dinosaur remains were in the form of fossils. I think that is the 
only way that dinosaurs have been found here in Antarctica.

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MAMMOTHS AND MASTODONS
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QUESTION: Have any bones or fossils of mammoths or mastodons 
been found? Do you think they lived in Antarctica?

ANSWER from Diane Rink on Jan. 16 1995 
As far as I know, no bones or fossils of mammoths or mastodons have 
been located in Antarctica. Dinosaur bones have been found here, but 
dinosaurs lived between 250 million and 65 million years ago when 
Antarctica was situated in a very different part of the globe than at the 
South Pole. Mastodons and mammoths are much more recent than 
dinosaurs, having lived tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago 
when Antarctica was as isolated climatically as it is now. They may 
have been here, but no evidence of them has yet surfaced.