190mn-yr-old bird-hipped dino fossils found in Antarctic mountains
By ANISaturday, February 19, 2011
WASHINGTON - Palaeontologists have discovered the fossil remains of fabrosaur, about 190 million years old in the Antarctic mountains.
William Hammer of Augustana College found the fossils belonging to ornithischian or bird-hipped dinosaur that he believes is related to the fabrosaur or heterodontosaur.
The remains came from a site on Mt. Kirkpatrick, in the Central Trans-Antarctic Mountains, which divide east and west Antarctica.
“I don’t know if we have a head, but we have a leg and a foot. It will take us a year to get a handle on what we’ve got,” Discovery News quoted Hammer as saying.
Thomas Holtz, professor of geology at the University of Maryland, said that the new find could tell us a lot more about the evolution of dinosaurs as well as the Antarctic environment.
“This is a time when dinosaurs had just taken over. They are the rabbits of the plant-eating dinosaurs: small, common, fairly fast, and they didn’t have a lot of armor. They almost never show up in the movies or nobody makes plastic toys of them, but they are the stock from which the greatest plant eating dinosaurs evolved,” Holtz said. (ANI)
