Glacialisaurus Hammeri
(images via: The Antarctic Sun, Wikia and TVPP)
It’s Hammertime! Make that Hammeri time as in Glacialisaurus Hammeri, and its time has long since passed. A contemporary of the aforementioned Cryolophosaurus (and very probably its prey), the chillingly-named Glacialisaurus lived in what are now the central Transantarctic Mountains of Antarctica but about 190 million years ago, during the Early Jurassic period. Glacialisaurus Hammeri was a herbivore as were his sauropod brethren, although this Antarctic dinosaur was relatively small as sauropods go: it’s estimated the creature weighed around 5 tons and grew up to 25 feet long.
(image via: LiveScience)
Discovered during the Antarctic summer of 1990-91 by Bill Hammer, a paleontologist with Augustana College, the bones of Glacialisaurus were not officially named and described until 2007. “The fossils were painstakingly removed from the ice and rock using jackhammers, rock saws and chisels under extremely difficult conditions over the course of two field seasons,” explained Nathan Smith, a graduate student at The Field Museum in Chicago who co-authored the report with Diego Pol, a paleontologist at the Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio in Chubut, Argentina.
Trinisaura Santamartaensis
(images via: Spinops/Nobu Tamura and Teratophoneus)
The fossil remains of Trinisaura Santamartaensis, a small (4 ft or 1.5 meters tall) herbivorous dinosaur, were found at Santa Marta Cove on James Ross Island, Antarctica, in 2008 by Rodolfo Aníbal Coria and Juan José Moly. This advanced dinosaur lived during the Late Cretaceous period and although artist Nobu Tamura‘s snowy rendering above is a visual delight, Antarctica was still very much a warm, vegetated, inhabitable place for millions of years after the last dinosaurs went extinct. Even so, it’s not out of the question whether Trinisaura Santamartaensis and other polar dinosaurs has feathers, as the astonishing sketch by Robinson Kunz above illustrates.
(image via: Cosmos Magazine)
Trinisaura Santamartaensis was an ornithischian, or “bird-hipped” dinosaur and was related to similar species found in today’s Argentina. It’s thought that a land bridge once connected the long and sinuous Antarctic Peninsula, an extension of the Andes mountain chain, with the southern tip of South America allowing species to migrate according to seasonal changes in the local climate. It may just be, due to their presumed adaptation to the then-Antarctic’s undoubtedly cool if not chilling sunless winters whether Antarctic dinosaurs like Trinisaura were able to survive the environmental catastrophe 66 million years ago that closed the Age of Dinosaurs… if only for a while. Paleontologists have only investigated a tiny fraction of Antarctica to date so we can surely expect an answer in time, perhaps when Antarctica is once again a warmer place.

