Antarctica detour leads to dramatic discovery

AFT member Allen Kihm, a geoscience professor at Minot State University in North Dakota, set out for Antarctica with nine colleagues last December. Their mission: unearth a rare dinosaur skeleton on Vega Island. Shifting ice, however, forced a last-minute destination change, which also meant the scientists who were prepared for their Vega Island exploration had to start from scratch.

“You get to do what Antarctica lets you do,” says Kihm, a former vice president of the North Dakota Public Employees Association, an affiliate of AFT Public Employees. “You make the best plans and preparations, but if Mother Nature says no, you just have to adapt.”

Not only did the group adapt, settling on James Ross Island and a daily round-trip trek of almost 10 miles to reach the closest rocks with possible fossils, the scientists found jaw fragments and parts of the hind feet of some kind of meat-eating dinosaur.

“Nobody has ever found a meat eater from this age in Antarctica,” Kihm says, adding that fewer than 10 dinosaurs have ever been found there. “Just the fact that we found another one made it worthwhile.”

The newly discovered dinosaur, which lived 70 to 75 million years ago, was a marine reptile that looked something like the common image of the Loch Ness monster.

Nevertheless, the scientists did not complete their mission—Vega Island—which has been on Kihm’s radar since 1999, when an exploration he was part of found skeletons there but didn’t have the equipment to remove them at the time. “No one has ever gotten a skull, so that was our goal,” he says.

The scientists hope to return in January 2005 to get another chance to recover the fossils on Vega Island. They are still negotiating with the National Science Foundation, which funded the trip. “If we can go back in January, recovering the skull would be our No. 1 priority,” Kihm says.