The “lost worlds” are in stark contrast to modern Antarctica, which is teeming with strange life, despite everything having turned to fossil.
According to a study recently published in the scientific journal Science Advances, the results of geological and sedimentary analyses of core samples taken from the Amundsen Sea continental shelf in West Antarctica have revealed two surprising “lost worlds.”
The first world is represented by deep sediment layers dating back to the mid-Cretaceous period, approximately 85 million years ago.
It is a sedimentary layer filled with fossil traces of countless strange plants and animals that are no longer present on Earth today.
Evidence of a “lost world” from the dinosaur era beneath frozen Antarctica – (Photo AI: Anh Thư)
In addition to the fundamental fossils, spores and pollen trapped in ice also reveal a temperate rainforest that once thrived in what is now a land of perpetual ice.
This discovery provides authentic evidence for a hypothesis suggesting that during the era when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, there was a time when the planet was much warmer – at least in the southern regions – and that modern Antarctica was a land teeming with life.
The second sediment layer, which is shallower, holds evidence of another lush period belonging to the Paleocene epoch (55.8-33.9 million years ago), which is the epoch immediately following the Cretaceous period when dinosaurs went extinct.
The sediments reveal that Paleocene Antarctica was still a vast river plain, with a large organic content, indicating that many plants and animals lived there during that time.
This ancient river plain had a “backbone” of a massive river system flowing from the rising Antarctic mountains into the Amundsen Sea.
According to Heritage Daily, scientists were previously aware of another ice-free period in Antarctica through the unfortunate Terra Nova expedition from 1910 to 1913.
This expedition discovered fossils from the Glossopteris tree, an extinct genus of seed ferns that disappeared during the end-Permian mass extinction, which occurred around 252 million years ago.
