Discovery: 95 million-year-old land bridge across Antarctica carried dinosaurs between continents

 Paleontologists have been studying how dinosaurs migrate and wound up in different continents. At one time all of the continents were together, and the land mass was known as Pangea.  In today's blog you'll learn about that, but also how Dinosaurs roamed in what is now Ice-covered Antarctica!

Photo: Ann's skull is only the second sauropod skull found to date in Australia and is exceptionally well-preserved. (Image credit: Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum)

WHAT IS PANGEA? From about 300-200 million years ago (late Paleozoic Era until the very late Triassic), the continent we now know as North America was contiguous with Africa, South America, and Europe. They all existed as a single continent called Pangea 

95 million-year-old land bridge across Antarctica carried dinosaurs between continents

STORY FROM LIVE SCIENCE: By Sascha Pare April 17, 2023

The first-ever near-complete sauropod skull found in Australia is remarkably similar to fossils from South America, which suggests that dinosaurs roamed across ice-free Antarctica.

A nearly 100 million-year-old, exceptionally well-preserved sauropod skull discovered in Australia may show that dinosaurs trudged across Antarctica from South America to Australia, researchers have revealed.

The near-complete sauropod skull belongs to a species called Diamantinasaurus matildae. Sauropods are known for their extremely long necks, with one dinosaur's neck stretching farther than a school bus. D. matildae was also a titanosaur, the only group of sauropod dinosaurs to live right until the end of the Cretaceous (145 million to 66 million years ago) before the non-avian dinosaurs went extinct.

Paleontologists excavated the specimen in 2018 from a sheep ranch northwest of Winton, in Queensland, Australia, and nicknamed it "Ann." D. matildae was as long as a tennis court (78 feet or 23.77 meters) and weighed around 27.5 tons (25 metric tons), three times more than Tyrannosaurus rex. The fossils look strikingly similar to bones unearthed in Argentina, which prompted researchers to think that sauropods journeyed between South America and Australia, via Antarctica.

(Image: Pangea- all continents together as one land mass)

"In analyzing the remains, we found similarities between the Ann skull and the skull of a titanosaur called Sarmientosaurus musacchioi, which lived in South America at about the same time as Diamantinasaurus lived in Queensland," Stephen Poropat, a paleontologist at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and lead author of a new study into the fossils, said in a statement(opens in new tab). "We suggest that sauropods were traveling between Australia and South America, via Antarctica, during the mid Cretaceous."

In the hothouse world of the Cretaceous, Antarctica was blanketed with lush forests and vegetation. Scientists already knew that sauropods roamed the now-frigid landmass, after the first long-necked-dinosaur fossil in Antarctica was discovered in 2011. Some scientists had already theorized that these behemoths used Antarctica to bridge continents. At the time, Australia, New Zealand, Antarctica and South America were joined and formed the last remnant of the supercontinent Gondwana, according to the Australian Museum.

Now, in a study published Wednesday (April 12) in the journal Royal Society Open Science, researchers compared the best-preserved sauropod skull found to date in Australia with others from across the world.