WASHINGTON, Feb. 28 (UPI) -- Dinosaurs roamed a much warmer "lost world" of Antarctica millions of years after they died out elsewhere on Earth, judging by recent fossil findings.
A team of dinosaur-hunters told the Toronto Globe and Mail they have found remains of a new species which dates from only 70 million years ago. The species, however, bears striking similarities to dinosaurs thought to have died out everywhere else ten of millions of years earlier.
Expedition leader Judd Case, dean of science and biology professor at California's Saint Mary's College, told globeandmail.com from Washington, D.C. that the radically changing day-night cycle of the far south probably slowed the spread of flowering plants, which wold have limited their evolution from becoming the massive, plant-eating dinosaurs found farther north.
"One of the surprising things is that animals with these more primitive characteristics generally haven't survived as long elsewhere as they have in Antarctica," Dr. Case said. "For whatever reason, they were still hanging out on the Antarctic continent."
The creature, as yet unnamed, is thought to have been a relatively small theropod, a carnivorous group of upright dinosaurs that includes the well known and fearsome tyrannosaurus.
