Scientists working in Antarctica have found fossils of what appear to be two previously unknown species of dinosaurs - a six-foot meat-eater, and one of the earliest plant-eaters ever.
The discoveries add to the small, but growing list of dinosaurs unearthed in Antarctica since 1986. Scientists said the animals adapted and thrived in a climate more akin to the Pacific Northwest than to Antarctica today.
"It was more lush," said biologist Judd Case of Saint Mary's College of California, a co-leader of one of the teams that reported their finds in Washington yesterday. "You [would have seen] snow or ice back on the hilltops, but lots of trees. ... Cool, but not cold."
Two teams funded by the National Science Foundation made their discoveries within days of each other in December, during the brief Antarctic summer.
The fossils were separated by 2,000 miles and 120 million years. The primitive plant-eater grazed about 190 million years ago, early in the Jurassic period. The carnivore hunted at the end of the Cretaceous period, just 70 million years ago.
The scientists were jubilant about their good luck. "You don't immediately want to believe it, just in case," said paleontologist William Hammer, of Augustana College in Rock Island, Ill., who led the second team. But when it sinks in, he said, "it's close to pandemonium."
Paleontologists have been finding dinosaur fossils in the Antarctic since 1986, when an Argentine team found evidence of an armored plant-eater called an ankylosaur that lived near the end of the age of dinosaurs.
The frozen continent was not always so frozen. Geologists say all the continents have been drifting around the planet for eons atop the Earth's molten mantle. Long before the dinosaurs evolved, the block that became Antarctica was actually at the Earth's equator.
It later drifted southward, reaching the polar region about 100 million years ago. But it remained connected to South America and Australia by a land bridge, and its climate was milder than it is today.
Geologist Jim Martin of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, said he and Case and their team sailed last fall toward a remnant of that land bridge, the Antarctic Peninsula, which stretches toward Chile.
They sought evidence that primitive marsupials migrated from the Americas - where they originated - across Antarctica to Australia.
