It's not getting to the pole that counts. It's what you learn of scientific value on the way. Plus the fact that you get there and back without being killed.

—Robert Byrd

Before getting to the story of my fossil-hunting expeditions, it is interesting to understand how important the early Antarctic explorers regarded any fossil finds, in some cases dragging the rock and fossil specimens with them to their deaths, as in Scott's last expedition.

The very first fossils found from the Antarctic region were pieces of fossilized wood from Seymour Island collected by Captain Carl Larsen, a Norwegian who sailed south on the whaler Jason and landed on the Antarctic Peninsula over the austral summer of 1892-93. Afterwards he sailed on to reach 68° south, which was at the time the furthest southern latitude attained by any sailing trip, before having to turn back. The Jason,after having been at sea for several months and running short of supplies, met up with another whaling ship, the Balaena,on 28 December 1892. Aagaard recorded that some of the crewmen traded fossils for tobacco, quoting them as saying, “What were fossils good for when you had Navy cut and juicy quids?”

Larsen was a shrewd man who exchanged some of his brandy for pipe tobacco and kept hold of his fossils, which he would later give to the University of Oslo. These were formally described soon after as the first fossils from Antarctica.

In 1902 Swedish geologist Otto Nordenskjöld made the first major sledge journey in Antarctica, collecting many fine fossils and geologi-

cal specimens from the western islands off the Antarctic Peninsula. His group wintered over on Snow Hill Island. Their ship, the Antarctic, dropped some men off at Hope Bay and shortly after was crushed in the pack ice. The men then discovered Jurassic plant fossils at Hope Bay. The crew of the ship spent a winter stranded on Paulet Island while Nordenskjöld and his men endured a second savage winter on Snow Hill Island, waiting patiently until they were finally rescued by an Argentinean ship in November 1903. During the long period he spent on the Antarctic Peninsula, Nordenskjöld also visited Seymour Island where he discovered the bones of giant penguins nearly 1.5 meters tall, a great diversity of shells and other marine fauna and well-preserved fossil leaves which led him to believe that, at one time in the past, Antarctica had been a much warmer place.

The fossil remains of archaeocyathids, a type of ancient, cup-shaped, sponge-like animal, were collected from the Antarctic region by the Scottish Antarctic Expedition of 1901-02; they were found by dredging up rock samples from the floor of the Weddell Sea. These were formally described by Dr. W.T. Gordon in 1920, who recognized that they were from the Cambrian Period, around 520 million years old, thus establishing the oldest age then known for the continent of Antarctica.

Ernest Shackleton's 1907-09 Nimrod expedition, driven largely by his determination to be the first to reach the South Pole, also resulted in many fine geological samples being collected. Isolated boulders found in the moraine and pebbles transported by the moving ice of glaciers in the upper reaches of the Beardmore Glacier contained small fossil archaeocyathids. An excellent monograph on the geological study of Shackleton's expedition specimens was published in 1914 by two of the participants, Australia's eminent professor of geology Sir Edgeworth David and British geologist Raymond Priestley. Their book included a special section on the paleontology written by Griffith Taylor and E.J. Goddard, which demonstrated that parts of the Transantarctic Mountains must be of Cambrian age.

The first fossils of vertebrate animals (fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals) to be collected on the mainland of Antarctica were bones of 380 million-year-old fishes found in Devonian

rocks at the Mackay Glacier near Granite Harbour. They were collected in the summer of 1911-12 by Frank Debenham, an Australian scientist who joined Scott's Terra Nova expedition. Debenham's samples were pieces of the fossiliferous Aztec Siltstone containing mostly fragmentary bones, teeth, and scales of primitive fishes. The specimens probably originated further inland at Mt. Suess and had been carried along as glacial moraine. The eminent British Museum paleontologist Sir Arthur Smith-Woodward published a paper in 1921 in the scientific reports of the Terra Nova expedition describing these fossils. He identified some eight different kinds of fossil fishes and named three new species.

The significance of this material lay in the fact that Smith-Woodward recognized what was essentially a fauna similar to those found in the “Old Red Sandstone” then well known throughout many parts of Scotland and Europe. This was the first recognition of such a fauna in the Southern Hemisphere, and enabled a date of Late Devonian age (around 370 million years old) to be assigned to the rocks. At this stage, though, the cosmopolitan nature of the fish fossils was not taken to mean anything implicit about the past positions of the continents in question, just that freshwater fishes were assumed to be widespread around the globe at that time.

The incredible significance of the study of Antarctic geology and the question of the age of the frozen continent is best revealed through the dramatic entries in Scott's last diary. In early 1912 Scott's party of five struggled back towards their base camp after reaching the South Pole on 17 January and despondently finding Amundsen 's victory message that he'd beaten them there by a month. Struggling along, low on food, scarred and weather-beaten by the harsh climate, they still managed to stop at the Beardmore Glacier and collect some 16 kilos of rock and fossil samples. It was the only day on Scott's final arduous march homewards from the pole that they were to devote to “geologizing.” Scott's entry for his diary on Thursday, 8 February 1912 exudes excitement as he recalls the discoveries they made:

The moraine was obviously so interesting that when we had advanced some miles and got out of the wind, I decided to camp and spend the rest of the day geologizing. It has been extremely interesting . . . Altogether we had a

most interesting afternoon, but the sun has just reached us, a little obscured by night haze. A lot could be written on the delight of setting foot on rock after fourteen weeks of snow and ice and nearly seven out of sight of all else. It is like going ashore on a sea voyage.

Any knowledge of the remote inland geology of the continent was considered of great importance to science in those times. Only nine days later things were getting harsher, and Scott's conscience turned to the subject of lugging the rocks back with them. Evans had wandered off into the snow that day and was found frostbitten with “a wild look in his eyes.” He was practically unconscious by the time they got him into the tent and he died quietly at 12:30 A.M. the next morning. On 16 or 17 March (Scott was unsure of the exact date), they were feeling despondent about making it back alive. They off-loaded a lot of their equipment but, due to Wilson's urging, kept the geological specimens. He wrote again about the burden of the rocks:

The cold is intense, −40° at midday. My companions are unendingly cheerful, but we are all on the verge of serious frostbites, and though we constantly talk of fetching through I don't think any one of us believes it in his heart.

We are cold on the march now, and at all times except meals. Yesterday we had to lie up for a blizzard and today we move dreadfully slowly. We are at No. 14 pony camp, only two pony marches from One Ton Depot. We leave here our theodolite, a camera, and Oates' sleeping bags. Diaries, &c., and geological specimens carried at Wilson's special request, will be found with us on our sledge.

This last remark implied that Scott knew instinctively that they would not make it back alive. Still, they carried the rocks onwards and the specimens were later found with their frozen bodies at their last camp. The men were buried in their tent where their bodies will remain frozen in their eternal, youthful state, until the slow action of the glacial ice eventually moves them out to sea.

Today the rocks and fossils collected by Scott's party are housed in the collections of the Natural History Museum in London and at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge. However, the specimens were not collected in vain. In 1914 British paleontologist A.C. Seward described the fossil plant remains collected by Scott's party from the Beardmore Glacier region. Although Ernest Shackleton's ex-

pedition had also stopped at the Beardmore Glacier and collected various geological specimens in 1908, four years earlier than Scott 's party, they had not found any plant fossils. As is so often the case in the fossil business, those who search the hardest ultimately find the best specimens.

Seward made an amazing discovery. He was able to identify two genera of plants in Scott's specimens, Glossopteris and Vertebraria, both well-known forms from countries now not close to Antarctica. Glossopteris, for example, was an extinct seed fern with distinctive leaf patterns. It was known at that time from India, Australia, and South Africa, but not from any of the Northern Hemisphere countries. Thus the first seeds of the concept of “Gondwana” as a giant southern super-continent were inadvertently sown.

Since the 1950s many geological expeditions have explored parts of the Transantarctic Mountains and the Antarctic Peninsula, both of which contain rich exposures of fossil-bearing strata, and their discoveries have filled out many of the missing gaps in the fossil record of the continent. Antarctica is now revealing itself as being home to an almost continuous pageant of life, represented by fossils ranging from simple invertebrates and algae at the beginning of the Cambrian Period, 540 million years ago, through to recently discovered fossil whales and dolphins about three million years old. Shell assemblages, only tens of thousands of years old, were discovered in the McMurdo district during Scott's days.

In his 1968 book, Men and Dinosaurs, well-known American paleontologist Edwin H. Colbert posed the question: “Will dinosaurs some day be found on the Island Continent of Antarctica? That is a question of great importance, a tantalizing question that is at the back of the minds of many dinosaur hunters today.”

It was not until the mid-1980s that the first dinosaur bones were found in Antarctica, on James Ross Island off western Antarctica, by a team of scientists from Argentina. These were the fragmentary remains of an armored dinosaur, an ankylosaur. During the following years other bones of plant-eating dinosaurs, such as hypsilophodontids, were uncovered from the same region of peninsular Antarctica. The most spectacular dinosaur find occurred in 1990 in the central part of the

Transantarctic Mountains. A large carnivorous dinosaur was discovered by geologist David Elliot of the Byrd Polar Research Center, Ohio, in Early Jurassic sandstones (around 190 million years old) near the top of Mt. Kirkpatrick, which rises to more than 4,000 meters, undoubtedly the highest fossil locality anywhere in Antarctica. When paleontologist Bill Hammer from Augustana College, Illinois excavated the bones in 1991 he found even more remains of other dinosaurs and fossil reptiles from the site.

The dinosaur was a predator like the well-known Allosaurus and was later christened Cryolophosaurus ellioti by Hammer and his colleague, Bill Hickerson. It is the most complete dinosaur skeleton so far recovered from Antarctica. Cryolophosaurus was about seven or eight meters long and sported unusual swept-back bony crests above its eyes, giving it a kind of weird Elvis Presley look. In 1996 I visited Augustana College and studied the original specimen. It's truly an amazing find and one that, when considered in the context of the unusual dinosaur faunas of Australia, opens up a whole range of interesting questions concerning how and where different families of dinosaurs originated, and when and how they may have migrated around the globe.

Until all the Transantarctic Mountains are climbed and searched, we can only guess at how many more priceless scientific treasures are still waiting to be discovered. Our 1991-92 expedition had a mission to map the geology of unknown regions and collect fossils that would fill out the bigger picture of what Antarctica's ancient environments were like in the Devonian period (355-408 million years ago).

The trouble with collecting so many fine specimens, and so much new geological data, is that it takes several years to prepare and study all the specimens and synthesize the new results with previously published information. As this book goes to press, we have since published a series of scientific papers based on both the new material we collected combined with the older collections, resulting in some five new genera of lobe-finned fishes being described, three new genera of sharks and one new placoderm, an extinct group of armored shark-like fish. Publication details are listed at the end of this book.

There still remain some undescribed forms of lungfishes, new placoderms, new types of acanthodians (an extinct group of spiny

fishes), and a new ray-finned fish (the largest modern group of fishes which include forms like the trout and goldfish) that we are currently working on. The goal of our systematic work is to first describe the fossils we have, and thus identify what species are present in the Antarctic fauna, then make useful comparisons with similar faunas from nearby Gondwana countries. We can then use these observations to test existing hypotheses concerning the nature of plate tectonic reconstructions, or the refinement of the age of fossil-bearing deposits throughout Gondwana.

People often ask me how useful is it to study the long-dead fishes of Antarctica. How can it benefit society? Well, here's a simple example of how our work down in Antarctica has been of some use in recent years.

In late 1996 a team of paleontologists from South Africa invited me over to study their Middle Devonian fish faunas and to participate in a field trip with the intention of collecting more specimens. During that trip to the scenic Cedarberg Mountains, about 300 kilometers north of Cape Town, we discovered some new sites that were rich in Devonian fish fossils, although most sites yielded only fragmentary bits and pieces of the fishes. One of these sites, a remote spot high up in the Cedarberg Mountains, contained abundant fossilized shark's teeth. At the time I instantly recognized some of these as belonging to the same new species I had found in Antarctica! Here then, for the first time, was a major continental correlation between the Aztec Siltstone of Antarctica and the Klipbokkop and Adolphspoort formations of South Africa. This discovery not only reinforced and confirmed the age of the South African fish deposits, but supported the Gondwana connection between Antarctica and South Africa in Middle Devonian times.

In the search for new economic deposits of minerals, oil, or gas, the dating of rock layers using fossils is a valuable tool that can save the exploration companies a lot of expensive drilling, or even point the way to more likely prospects through the environmental information the fossils provide. Fossils therefore give important information that contributes to the overall picture of the geology of a larger region.

There is more to paleontology than just using fossils to estimate the ages of rocks or their past environmental settings. Let us look for a moment at Antarctica as a continent. It is the fifth largest continent on

Earth, much larger than Australia, and about 1.5 times the size of the United States of America, covering approximately thirteen million square kilometers. More than 90 percent of Antarctica has an ice sheet nearly four kilometers thick over it. This makes Antarctica the world's highest continent, with an average relief of about 2.7 kilometers above sea level. Most of the world's fresh water is locked up as ice in Antarctica and if this ice sheet ever thawed out entirely the seas of the world would rise approximately 60 meters. This fact alone is of ample significance to justify our endeavors in understanding the prehistory of Antarctica in order to decipher the trends of its ongoing climatic evolution.

The Antarctic Treaty, which was ratified in 1961 and signed by a dozen participating countries, precludes the economic mining or exploitation of resources from Antarctica. Still, the study of Antarctic geology and paleontology is vital to understanding the big picture of Gondwana during the past times when no political or physical boundaries existed between Antarctica, Australia, Africa, South America, India, and much of the Middle East as we know it today (incidentally, the richest oil-producing countries in the world). If you drive a car and need petrol, you need fossils. Most petroleum deposits around the world have been found using the microscopic fossils within the layers of rocks the drill brings up as a guide to drilling depth. So, even esoteric research like the study of ancient fishes that once swam around Antarctica nearly 400 million years ago may prove to be of benefit to society's needs somewhere down the line. It's that simple.

Moreover, all economic considerations aside, I feel that we need to understand Antarctica as an evolving continent, from the study of its prehistoric environments and extinct animal and plant life, because it is all part of the global knowledge that contributes to our present understanding of the world as a whole living, evolving system. Without knowing Antarctica's full story, how can we possibly interpret our fluctuating climates and global weather patterns? How can we possibly predict global warming and its impact on future societies until we know how much of the world's weather is reliant on factors emanating from Antarctica?

Fossils are the prime way of deciphering the past climatic regimes of the Earth, giving a yardstick by which to measure the nature of cli-

matic variation through time. The methods of doing this involve studying the climatic constraints of living species and making inferences about how closely related fossil species would have lived. In addition, geochemical analysis of the ratios of oxygen isotopes, formed in the shells of marine organisms, can be used to provide accurate data on the range of temperatures of seas during prehistoric times.

Large biogenically produced structures, such as reefs, seem to have always been climatically constrained due to the high-energy requirements of their existence. Therefore the presence of such large-scale fossil reefs is generally indicative of that part of the world having once been within a tropical zone. So, to make a long story short, these are just some of the many ways that fossils contribute towards reconstructing past climates. In order to fill out this picture more data are required from many parts of the world so that scientists can fine-tune the existing model. Any information on the fossil assemblages of Antarctica is therefore significant in contributing valuable information towards the big picture of the Earth's climatic evolution.

Other areas of Antarctic science are extremely important to our global community. The hole in the ozone layer was discovered by British scientists in Antarctica working on atmospheric physics. Chemists working in remote parts of the polar plateau of Antarctica can measure the subtle levels of global pollution by analyzing minute amounts of metals like arsenic or mercury from “pristine” ice core samples, and give us a world measure of pollution increase on a year to year basis.

Zoologists studying nematode worms locked in the sea ice for tens of years have discovered that they have the ability to come back to life after being frozen solid. Implications from such discoveries for effective cryogenics, or the possibility of being able to freeze people for long periods of space travel in the distant future, are nothing short of mind-boggling. And finally, let us not overlook the vast biogenic productivity of the shelf seas around Antarctica as another possible vital food source for the world, a subject to which I shall return later in this book.

Today Antarctica is the world's laboratory, a place of peace and cooperation where many different disciplines of valuable scientific research are conducted by many different nations. It is also opening up to the increasing demands of tourism, for one of its major and most

important resources will always be its unique beauty, its primal appeal to the sense of adventure in all of us.

Yet the only way anyone gets to go to Antarctica and travel extensively inland to its most remote regions is generally through participation in a scientific research program. Even if you can get yourself involved in such an expedition, with full approval and funding to support your venture, as I did, one must still undertake all the necessary preparations and training so as not to succumb to its many dangers.

And this I did, at Tekapo, in the mountainous center of the South Island of New Zealand, in 1988.