TWO previously unknown species of dinosaur have been discovered in Antarctica, shedding new light on the natural history of the continent’s warmer past.

The fossilised remains of the dinosaurs, one a carnivore and one a herbivore, were discovered in the same week by independent teams working thousands of miles apart, one at the top of a mountain and the other on the dried-up sea floor.

Together they add greatly to scientists’ understanding of an Antarctic lost world, in which dinosaurs and other animals and plants thrived when the continent was at least 10C warmer than it is today.

While palaeontologists have long assumed that dinosaurs spread to Antarctica when it was joined to other continental land masses more than 100 million years ago, their presence was confirmed by fossil evidence only in 1986.

Just a few dozen specimens belonging to a handful of species have been recovered since then, making the finds reported yesterday by the US National Science Foundation particularly remarkable.

The predator, from the theropod group that includes Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor, stood between 6ft and 8ft tall and lived 70 million years ago. The long-necked herbivore, about 7ft tall and 30ft long, appears to be a smaller example of the sauropod group, which includes the 90ft Diplodocus. It died about 200 million years ago.

Neither of the new species has yet been given a name, which will happen only when they are confirmed as new species by independent referees.

Both, however, have characteristics never seen in existing dinosaur fossils found in Antarctica, and are expected to make important contributions to understanding of dinosaur evolution.

As Antarctica became isolated when it separated from the southern supercontinent known as Gondwanaland and drifted towards its present position, its species appear to have retained primitive traits that disappeared from their relatives elsewhere around the globe.

Judd Case, of St Mary’s College of California, who led the team that discovered the new predator, said: “One of the surprising things is that animals with these more primitive characteristics generally have not survived as long elsewhere as they have in Antarctica. But, for whatever reason, they were still hanging out on the Antarctic continent.”

The theropod fossil is particularly important as it dates from the late Cretaceous period immediately before the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Only one other theropod dinosaur from this era has ever been found before in Antarctica.

It was found by Dr Case and his colleague James Martin, of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, on the James Ross Island on the Antarctic peninsula.

The fossil hunters were working on a geological feature known as the Naze, an exposed rock formation that was laid down at the end of the Cretaceous period. At that time it was underwater, between 100m and 200m (300-650ft) beneath the Weddell Sea.

Fragments of the dinosaur’s upper jaw and teeth, isolated individual teeth and most of the bones of its lower legs and teeth were unearthed, giving the team a good picture of its size and shape. Dr Martin said the shape of the leg bones indicate it was a running dinosaur between 6ft and 8ft tall, which fell into the ocean and floated out to sea when it died.

The sauropod was discovered in a separate dig near the Beardmore glacier at the summit of Mount Kirkpatrick, several thousand miles away, by a team led by William Hammer of Augustana College in Illinois.

It was found by chance when Dr Hammer, a veteran dinosaur hunter who in 1991 discovered the Antarctic predator Cryolophosaurus ellioti on Mount Kirkpatrick, decided to search for fossils away from his main dig site while engineers made safe a dangerous overhang.

Peter Braddock, his mountain safety guide, picked out an interesting rock that turned out to be the dinosaur’s pelvis. “I jokingly said to him, ‘Keep your eyes down, look for weird things in the rock’,” Dr Hammer said.

“He had marked four or five things he thought were odd, including some fossilised roots. But I realised that one of these things was bone: part of a huge pelvis and illium and much, much bigger than the corresponding bones in Cryolophosaurus.” The pelvis belongs to a sauropod that was between 6ft and 7ft tall and up to 30ft long. The rocks in which the fossil was found indicate an age of about 200 million years.

Dr Hammer said there was no question that the species was new. “This site is so far removed geographically from any site near its age, it’s clearly a new dinosaur to Antarctica,” he said. “We have so few dinosaur specimens from the whole continent, compared with any other place, that almost anything we find down there is new to science.”

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