A Dinosaur in Antarctica

Teacher notes

The idea behind the sheet

Continental drift is usually taught as a fact to be accepted: the continents move, here is a diagram of Pangaea. This sheet runs it the other way round. Students meet a genuine puzzle first — a plant-eating dinosaur in a place with no plants — and the moving continents arrive as the solution to something that already bothers them.

That order matters. It is also the historical order: fossils turning up in impossible places were among the first serious evidence that the continents had moved at all.

The two specimens

• Cryolophosaurus ellioti — “frozen crested lizard”. Mt Kirkpatrick, Antarctica. Early Jurassic, about 194–188 million years ago. A meat-eater with a distinctive crest above its eyes.
• Antarctopelta oliveroi — “Antarctic shield”. James Ross Island, Antarctica. Late Cretaceous, about 74–70 million years ago. An armoured plant-eater, and the one that makes question 3 bite.

The two lived roughly 120 million years apart, so students working on different specimens will see quite different maps in Deep time. That is worth drawing out rather than smoothing over.

Expected responses

• Q2 — Covered in thick ice, almost no plants, very cold, deserts of ice. Not forests, not warm.
• Q3 — A plant-eater needs plants, in quantity, all the time. There are almost none in Antarctica today. So either the animal could not have lived there, or Antarctica was not like this then.
• Q5 — Today: separated from every other continent, sitting over the South Pole. In the Jurassic and Cretaceous: joined to or very close to other southern landmasses, and further from the pole. Accept approximate answers; the point is that both columns differ.
• Q6 — The third option. Look for reasoning that refers to what they actually saw on the globe, not just the right box ticked.
• Q7 — A few centimetres a year is around a kilometre every 50,000 years, so tens of millions of years is enough to move a continent thousands of kilometres. Students who reach for a calculator here are doing exactly the right thing.

Common misconceptions to watch for

• “The fossil slid there.” Some students picture the animal dying elsewhere and the bones travelling. Ask how far bones could realistically move, and across an ocean.
• “It had fur / it was adapted to cold.” Reasonable thinking, but it does not solve the plant problem for Antarctopelta. Adaptation cannot conjure a food supply.
• “The continents drifted apart from a single blob, once.” Movement is continuous and still happening — not a single historical event that finished.

Extending it

• Have different groups take different specimens from other southern continents — South America, Africa, Australia, India — and compare their Deep time maps. Related animals on now-separated continents is the same argument at larger scale.
• Alfred Wegener proposed drifting continents in 1912, using fossil evidence much like this. He was dismissed for decades because he could not explain how continents could move. The mechanism — sea-floor spreading — arrived in the 1960s and he was vindicated posthumously. This pairs directly with the Science Changes Its Mind worksheet.
• Where do the atlas's ancient coastlines come from? The About panel credits the GPlates model from the EarthByte group at the University of Sydney. Students can be told, truthfully, that they are looking at published research rather than an artist's guess.

Curriculum links

This sheet is free to print, copy and use in any classroom. It works on its own, but pairs naturally with Specimen Fact File (research skills) and Science Changes Its Mind (how evidence revises conclusions).