But again, as with many weird things found in Antarctica, the explanation is much simpler. In other words, theres a good chance we could be looking at some serious melting in the near future, thanks to this glacier and the ice around it. The weather controls all. Shocking Rituals From The Cannibal Indian Aghori Monks, 6 Incredible Europe Contiki Tours to Go On, 74 Underrated and Off The Beaten Path Places To Visit, How to Get From Tirana Airport to the City, 9 Easy Ways To Repurpose Podcast Content In 2023. One of the most exciting discoveries is the HMS Endurance, a ship that belonged to explorer Ernest Shackleton that sank in 1915. There are numerous conspiracy theories regarding Antarctica, and we wont get into them (though some are hilarious). And work on the bones unearthed over the past few decades has just begun; now that they are housed in a museum, OGorman says there is a lot of other research that can be done on this ancient specimen. This creepy looking fall was named Blood Falls because of its deep color resembling blood. And when Habib, Hone, and Royal Tyrrell Museum paleontologist Franois Therrien compared the holes in the Canadian pterosaurs neck vertebrae against those for all other known azhdarchids, they found that its arrangement is unique. Dragon skin occurs when strong "katabatic" winds downslope winds that exist only over icy regions continually lift the polynya's surface ice, subsequently freezing the water below, according to Guy Williams, a polar oceanographer from the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania in Australia. The main reference fossil for Cryodrakon belonged to an individual pterosaur that had a roughly 16-foot wingspan. The Dragon's Breath cave is the largest non subglacial lake in the world. The arrangement of these pneumatophores can help scientists tell pterosaur species apart. Nearly all of these have been found since 1976. Horgan first spotted hints of the subsurface structure in 2020 while looking at a satellite photo of the area. Crew-6 commander Stephen Bowen and pilot Warren "Woody" Hoburg, flanked by cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev and United Arab Emirates flier Sultan Alneyadi, planned to strap . The amber adds to fossil evidence that many dinosaurs. Researchers drilled more than 1,600 feet under the Larsen Ice Shelf. Jupiter and Venus 'kiss' in a stunning planetary conjunction tonight. Scientists have found a tiny animal, Tullbergia, living under rocks in Antarctica's inland mountain peaks, where nothing should survive. There are twenty total voting members associated with the treaty. . The Nathaniel B. Palmer expedition is currently at "ground zero" of a katabatic wind event, Williams said, with hurricane-strength gusts topping 75 miles per hour (120 km/h). Rare find'. IE 11 is not supported. Schulp has worked on some plesiosaurs from the Netherlands, but he says the aquatic reptiles are very different in the Southern Hemisphere. Great images too. Antarctic researchers have shared images of the rarely seen scaly ice formation referred to as dragon ice. As a point of comparison, Habib visited Canadas Royal Tyrrell Museum to see the partial pterosaur skeleton dug up in 1992, whose limb bone is among the best preserved in the world. Youve got this weird situation where Quetzalcoatlus is basically the first azhdarchid to be named, so it becomes the definition of the [group], and yet theres no good description of it, says Hone, who describes the situation as a giant loop of not being able to solve the problem properly.. Bizzard was a young IceWing dragonet, covered in scars. Especially since you need to zoom in on a dark ocean cavern to spot it. New York, Dragon skin is also evidence of a "darker chaos" in the cryosphere (parts of the planet's surface where water is frozen), according to Williams. Published on 5/11/2017 at 1:25 AM. In retrospect, that doesnt make them any less creepy. The formation may be . Antarctica is ringed with more than half a million square miles of ice shelves the Filchner-Ronne is one of the largest, covering more than 160,000 square miles but boreholes have revealed an area of seafloor beneath them only the size of a tennis court. In 2003, however, a team discovered that the color was a result of oxidized iron. For a long time, paleontologists had instead assumed that the fossils belonged to a pterosaur called Quetzalcoatlus northropi, says study coauthor Dave Hone, a paleontologist at Queen Mary University of London. Maybe were being too harsh here after all, this is just a satellite image were talking about. Such an interesting post, Anita. They determined that the tunnels were most likely the result of meltwater flowing underneath the ice shelf. The largest meteorite discovered in Antarctica weighs 7.6 kilograms. Both animals belong to a group known as the azhdarchid (azh-DAHR-kid) pterosaurs, which were notable for being mostly head and neck. She had electric blue eyes, and a chilling aura. Over 14,000 meteorites have been found in the Sahara Desert of northern Africa, most since 1995, mainly by nomads and private collectors. YouTuber Michael Bradbury, who hosts the conspiracychannel MrMBB333, suggested that the skeleton remains indicated a dinosaur which had been preserved in the Antarctic ice. The 15-ton elasmosaur adds to evidence that a vibrant marine ecosystem existed just before the dinosaur mass extinction. There are also indications other animals may be fixed to the boulder, such as tube worms, stalked barnacles, or hydroids, which are related to jellyfish. Heres how it works. Unknown ancient people left the newly discovered fantastical creatures hewn of granite in Altai Mountains. An. "This changes our current understanding and models of these environments," Stevens said. "Were going to have our work cut out understanding what this means. As a species, they are present all around the planet, and can be as small as 1 millimeter in size. Their appearance is vastly different depending on which ocean you spot them in, but one thing is for certain: the sea pig is the stuff of nightmares, and definitely one of the weirdest things found in Antarctica. 1 The new Xuelong 2 (Snow Dragon 2 . While the boulder is located about 150 miles from the ocean, the direction of the currents beneath the ice shelf suggests the nearest plant life is up to 1,000 miles away, Griffiths said. The cavern is visible as the growing red blob in the center of the image. In 2007, the MS Explorer struck an iceberg while cruising off the Antarctic peninsula and sank, causing an oil spill near penguin breeding grounds. If youve seen Jurassic World, its the giant whale-like colossus from the feeding show. Ice that looks like a dragon's scales may sound like something from an episode of "Game of Thrones," but researchers recently observed the rare type of sea ice known as "dragon skin" in Antarctica. According to flat-earthers, Antarctica is actually a thick wall about 30 to 60 meters (100 to 200 ft.) high that surrounds our planet. Fact or fiction .An ancient species of dragon was found living in Antarctica? The "dragon-skin" sighting was an early highlight of the expedition, because the rare ice formation had not been seen in Antarctica since 2007, the researchers said. The cavern was also much wider nearer the roof. 18 Antarctica's Blood Falls. Habib, for one, still wants to use the limb measurements to calculate how it flewthe project that inadvertently turned up the frozen dragon in the first place. Researchers discovered swarms of shrimplike amphipods while they were exploring an underground Antarctic river. How a zoo break-in changed the life of an owl called Flaco, Naked mole rats are fertile until they die, study finds. Old cells hang around as we age, doing damage to the body. A National Geographic team has made the first ascent of the remote Mount Michael, looking for a lava lake in the volcanos crater. The roughly 5,000-year-old human remains were found in graves from the Yamnaya culture, and the discovery may partially explain their rapid expansion throughout Europe. Small mobile animals such as shrimp and crustaceans called sea fleas have been seen before beneath ice shelves, but no one expected to see stationary animals like these. Fossil 'sea monster' found in Antarctica was the heaviest of its kind The 15-ton elasmosaur adds to evidence that a vibrant marine ecosystem existed just before the dinosaur mass extinction. (Find out about a plesiosaur fossil found with a baby preserved in its body.). How did this mountain lion reach an uninhabited island? Old cells hang around as we age, doing damage to the body. In late April 2020, two Chinese icebreakers made a port call in Shanghai to a large state media celebration. Live Science is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. CNN During a recent excursion to the icy plains of Antarctica, an international team of researchers discovered five new meteorites including one of the largest ever found on the continent.. No, this has nothing to do withGame of Thrones. The SpaceX Crew-6 Falcon 9 rocket atop pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, awaiting a delayed launch to deliver a four-man crew to the International Space Station. It was caused due to millions of years of erosion, and it is not uncommon for mountains to have at least a partially pyramidal shape in various parts of the world. All rights reserved. The melting ice in Antarctica has revealed a skeleton of a mysterious creature - and the network believes it is a dinosaur. Its amazing that in the age of 50+ megapixel quality images we can still have grainy photos that yield Sasquatch or UFO-hunts on the Internet. With 170 of its 300-odd bones preserved, this scientifically important but privately owned skeleton is currently at the Museum fr Naturkunde in Berlin, Germany. ", However, others supported the 'ancient creature' claims, adding: "It looks like an alligator skeleton, definitely some type of reptile that walks on land. Most models of the Thwaites glacier dont take into account rapid cavern forming, so the entire glacier is likely to be melting much faster than our predictions estimate. The find came months after NASA successfully destroyed a 530-foot-wide . The scientists found the secret subterranean habitat tucked away beneath the Larsen Ice Shelf a massive, floating sheet of ice attached to the eastern coast of the Antarctic peninsula that. But, it could certainly be the subject of a song on their album! The remains first gained notoriety for their scars. One place I have not yet managed to get to maybe one day. The stripes color can be blue, black, or green. In the past 15 years, paleontologists have found more types of azhdarchids in France, Morocco, Kazakhstan, Hungary, Romania, and elsewhere, giving a much better reference for diversity within this pterosaur group. "This could be very, very old, going back to prehistoric Antartica. These things turned out to be over a ton of fossils on the James Ross Island, ranging from 71 to 67 million years old. Research aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer vessel is ongoing as the icebreaker continues to sail across the Ross Sea in West Antarctica. In addition, a small number of researchers have since gotten the chance to see the Quetzalcoatlus fossils up closeincluding Habib, who measured the bones to model how the creature flew. Discovered in 2010 in Montanas famed Hell Creek Formation of the late Cretaceous, the 40-foot-long fossil took four years to excavate and prepare. They were some kind of weird plesiosaurs that nobody knew.. Its definitely an indication that toward the end of the Cretaceous, [plesiosaurs] managed to expand their feeding repertoire, Schulp says. Can we bring a species back from the brink?, Video Story, Copyright 1996-2015 National Geographic Society, Copyright 2015-2023 National Geographic Partners, LLC. There are probably plenty of discoveries in Antarctica still to be made. Perhaps the most dragon-like mythological creatures found in Aboriginal mythology are the Rainbow Serpents. But if you empty and refill the tray each night, you get so much more," Williams said in a statement. Eco-friendly burial alternatives, explained. Immediately, we'd get about 2 feet of sea level rise. But to their surprise, the camera showed colonies of stationary animals attached to the rock probably sponges and related sea creatures.