The first duck-billed dinosaur (Family Hadrosauridae) from Antarctica

Abstract

Duck-billed dinosaurs or hadrosaurs are a very common family of dinosaurs in the Late Cretaceous of North America and Eurasia with rare occurrences in South America. Here, we report the first hadrosaur recovered in Antarctica from sandstones of late Maastrichtian age, Vega Island, Antarctic Peninsula (Fig. 1) during a joint U.S.-Argentinian geological and paleontological field expedition to the island. This discovery supports the hypothesis of a dispersal route between southern South America and Antarctica in the Maastrichtian.