600 million-year-old fossils of tiny humanoids found in Antarctica

In the rocky terrain of the Whitmore mountain range in Antarctica there have been found fossilized skeletal remains of what seems to be extremely small humans.

Interestingly enough, this discovery was made while yours truly was in Antarctica on assignment for The National Reporter to debunk a ridiculous tabloid story about a UFO base in the area.    

While investigating this silly story with several colleagues, we happened upon a group of paleontologists who were searching for evidence that dinosaurs had once roamed the Antarctic continent before it tore loose from Africa and South America and drifted southward to its present location.

What they found instead astonished them, not only because of what it was but because of its age.

“We tested the fossils and have determined without a shadow of a doubt that they are at least 600 million years old.” Doctor Marly of Cambridge University told us. 

“600 million years ago, jellyfish first appeared. There were no human beings in the world and there wouldn’t be any for nearly five hundred and 60 million years. There weren’t even any dinosaurs around at that time.”

“The first skeleton we found was hidden within the layers of a large piece of sedimentary rock that we had broken loose from the mountainside.
We knew that it would most likely  contain some fossils because of its type and age.” Dr.Marly explained.

“When we split the rock apart we were completely confused.  Here was this fossil from an age when the appearance of the first vertebrates was still millions of years off and it was a complete skeleton. And not only that, it appeared to be human.”    

“The second skeleton was a very good specimen, Unlike the first one, the second skeleton was in a fully extended position with excellent detail.” Dr. Marly told us.

“It is quite obvious from our study of these skeletons that they are definitely human and not a species of primate.  Who they were and how large their population was and if they were technologically advanced is a complete mystery.”

The fossils have been flown to the National Institute of ancient studies in Washington DC  for further analysis.

The National Reporter will be doing a follow-up report on this amazing discovery within the next few months. 

The National Reporter would also like to stress to our readers that these tiny fossilized humanoid skeletons are not the remains of extraterrestrial aliens as we expect the tabloids will be reporting it when the news breaks.

If you encounter any stories of these fossils that claim they are extra-terrestrial in origin, please ignore them.

Antarctica exposed: Very unusual 90 million-year-old dinosaur discovery made after the scan

The group, which included researchers from Imperial College London, explored fossilized remains 30 meters below west Antarctica’s ice for 90 million years.

A study of preserved roots pollen and spores revealed that the environment at that time was much warmer than previously thought. Led by geoscientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, their work suggests summer averages in this Cretaceous environment would have been in the 20Cs (68Fs).

Their findings, published in the journal Nature online, suggests Antarctica once had a thriving rainforest.

A video announcing the finds, detailed earlier this month: “A mission to the Antarctic has revealed fossilized plant roots preserved deep under the ocean since the time of the dinosaurs.

“It seems this freezing landscape was once home to a lush forest.

“Johann Klages and his team set out on a ship with a special drill to extract a core of material stretching down 30 meters into the seafloor.

“Studying the core, including analysis of fossilized pollen and spores, is revealing more about the environment of this ancient rainforest.

“This was one of the warmest periods in Earth’s history, with carbon dioxide levels several times higher than they are today.”

Dr. Klages explained how the team took a CT scan of what they found.

He said: “90 million years ago, a temperate rainforest existed in West Antarctica, only 900km away from the South Pole.

“When we extracted the core, we could already see what was inside and that it was very unusual, therefore we decided to scan them in a CT scanner back home.

“What we see here is an overview of the CT-scanned core and the yellow strata that we see is the sandstone, and now we transition into the network of fossil roots, and we can nicely see how the roots are connected with each other and are pristinely preserved.

“We have thin roots, we have thick roots and it’s really a network as you would get in a forest near you if you drilled down.”

Dr. Klages said that it is likely dinosaurs would have roamed the continent more than 90 million years ago.

He added: “It revealed a very warm temperature for this latitude and annual mean temperatures that are similar to those of northern Italy.

“It would be very certain that also dinosaurs and insects lived in that environment and in an environment that was dark for about four months during the year because we have the polar light.

“These extreme greenhouse climates are important for us to understand in full detail because it allows us to look into the future of how the planet will look if we excessively emit CO2 as we do now.”

Evidence of 90-million-year-old rainforest uncovered beneath the Antarctic ice

The well-preserved rainforest seeds, pollens and spores of 90 million year old (mid-cretaceous) rainforest plants in Western Antarctica have been discovered by an international team of paleontologists and geologists.

The mid-Cretaceous period (115 million to 80 million years ago) was the heyday of the dinosaurs but was also the warmest period in the past 140 million years, with temperatures in the tropics as high as 35 degrees Celsius and sea level 170 m higher than today.

However, little was known about the environment south of the Antarctic Circle at this time.

Professor Tina van of Flierdt, a professor at the Departments of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London, said “The survival of this 90 million-year-old forest is remarkable but even more surprising is the world that it reveals.

“Even during months of darkness, swampy temperate rainforests were able to grow close to the South Pole, revealing an even warmer climate than we expected.”

The evidence for the Antarctic forest comes from a core of sediment drilled at the site of PS104_20-2 (73.57°S, 107.09°W; 946 m water depth) near the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers in West Antarctica.

One section of the core, that would have originally been deposited on land, caught the scientists’ attention with its strange color.

“During the initial shipboard assessments, the unusual coloration of the sediment layer quickly caught our attention; it clearly differed from the layers above it,” said Dr. Johann Klages, a geologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research.

The team CT-scanned the section of the core and discovered an intact 3-m-long network of fossil roots, which was so well preserved that they could make out individual cell structures.

The 90-million-year-old sample also contained countless traces of pollen and spores from plants, including the first remnants of flowering plants ever found at these high Antarctic latitudes.

“The numerous plant remains indicate that 93 to 83 million years ago the coast of West Antarctica was a swampy landscape in which temperate rainforests grew — similar to the forests that can still be found, say, on New Zealand’s South Island,” said Professor Ulrich Salzmann, a paleoecologist at Northumbria University.

To reconstruct the environment of this preserved forest, the researchers assessed the climatic conditions under which the plants’ modern descendants live, as well as analyzing temperature and precipitation indicators within the sample.

They found that the annual mean air temperature was around 12 degrees Celsius. Average summer temperatures were around 19 degrees Celsius; water temperatures in the rivers and swamps reached up to 20 degrees.

They conclude that 90 million years ago the Antarctic continent was covered with dense vegetation, there were no land-ice masses on the scale of an ice sheet in the South Pole region, and the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere was far higher than previously assumed for the mid-Cretaceous period.

“Before our study, the general assumption was that the global carbon dioxide concentration in the Cretaceous was roughly 1,000 ppm,” Dr. Klages said.

“But in our model-based experiments, it took concentration levels of 1,120 to 1,680 ppm to reach the average temperatures back then in the Antarctic.”