The dean of science at Moraga’s St. Mary’s College announced Feb. 26 that he and his team of researchers have discovered fossilized remains believed to be that of a previously unknown species of dinosaur.

Judd Case, who teaches biology at St. Mary’s, said the fossils were found Dec. 12 on James Ross Island off the coast of Antarctica after bad weather had forced them away from their original research site.

The fossils are of a meat-eating dinosaur known as a theropod, which is related to the enormous Tyrannosaurus Rex. The remains include fragments of the upper jaw with teeth, individual teeth and many of the bones from the animal’s lower legs and feet. The structure of the bones indicate that the dinosaur was able to take long strides and to run, Case said at a news conference organized by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in Washington, DC., which funded his research.

The discovery by Case’s team marked the second time in less than a week that a new dinosaur species was found in Antarctica. A larger plant-eating dinosaur was discovered thousands of miles away on Mount Kirkpatrick by another group of researchers.

Case said the most unusual characteristic of the new theropod is its size. It is a great deal smaller than the Tyrannosaurus Rex. The animal’s foot and leg bones indicate that it stood between six and eight feet tall and weighed around 300 pounds.

“If you really want to put that picture into your head of a size, how they portrayed the size of the velociraptor in ‘Jurassic Park’ would have been about the same size of our dinosaur,” he said. “But fortunately real velociraptors are about half that size. But everybody has the license to portray dinosaurs any way they want.”

The scientific find came as a surprise to Case and his researchers. Extremely cold, icy weather and related travel problems kept them from going to Vega Island to continue some previous research in the migration of animals, said William Martin, a colleague of Case and curator of the vertebrate paleontology at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.

They believed that the island would provide a “smoking gun” showing that marsupials like kangaroos and koalas originated in North America and then traveled through South America into Antarctica while it was still part of a massive supercontinent before arriving in Australia. Instead, the researcher had to settle on the Antarctic peninsula in an area known as the Naze, where exposed materials represent a period at the end of the Mesozoic Era (248 million to 65 million years ago) that includes the Cretaceous Period.

At that time, the waters of the continental shelf covered the area at a depth of 300 to 650 feet. Because relatively few dinosaur fossils from the Cretaceous Period have been found in Antarctica the researchers were not expecting to find any.

Case admitted he was “taken aback” by the discovery. At first, “you’re not sure you’re seeing what you are seeing,” he said. But as the reality began to sink in he felt a “big sense of relief” to “find something of significance.”

The discovery took place in “a very unusual environment,” he said. The team was “well out into the ocean as far as what was represented at that time. And to come across a dinosaur was most unexpected... but boom, there it was on that particular day.”

The animal is believed to have floated from the shore out to sea after it died roughly 70 million years ago and settled to the bottom of what was then a very shallow area of the Weddell Sea. It has not yet been assigned a scientific name and is being referred to as the Naze theropod because of the geographic location. “We are still trying to be sure of the last identifications before we put our manuscript to a journal,” Case said.

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