NEW DIRECTIONS IN VERTEBRATE PALEONTOLOGICAL RESEARCH IN THE TRANSANTARCTIC MOUNTAINS, ANTARCTICA

Abstract

The emphasis on record setting during the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration meant that the scientific accomplishments of these expeditions often went overlooked (Larson, 2012). Many people know the story of the ill-fated (and second-place) return of Robert Falcon Scott from the South Pole, but few people are aware that 45 kg of Permian Glossopteris fossils were found with him and his deceased colleagues. Refusal to jettison the material suggests their recognition of its importance for understanding past life on the frozen continent. Since that time, great advances have been made in understanding the ancient life and environments of Antarctica. Here, I review some of these developments in the context of recent vertebrate paleontological research in the Transantarctic Mountains. In 1967 the first terrestrial vertebrate from the central Transantarctic Mountains, a small amphibian jaw, was discovered in Lower Triassic rocks at Graphite Peak (Barrett et al., 1968). Subsequent work has yielded three distinct Mesozoic faunas from the region. Early Triassic vertebrates have been collected at numerous localities in the lower Fremouw Formation around the Beardmore and Shackleton glaciers (Barrett et al., 1968). The Beardmore Glacier region has also produced an early Middle Triassic assemblage at two localities in the upper Fremouw Formation (Hammer et al., 1987; Sidor et al., 2007), and an Early Jurassic assemblage from the Hanson Formation on Mt. Kirkpatrick (Hammer and Hickerson, 1994). Early discoveries from the lower Fremouw Formation (Fig. 1) prompted comparisons to similar faunas from the Karoo Basin of South Africa, and the presence of taxa such as Lystrosaurus provided compelling support for the nascent theory of plate tectonics (Elliot et al., 1970). Antarctic faunas were often considered to represent taxonomic subsets of those found in the Karoo Basin, …