Shadowing Practice: When Antarctica Was a Jungle - Learn English Speaking with Video

Antarctica feels less like a continent and more like the end of the Earth.

98 % of it is buried beneath ice.

In places, that ice is almost 5 kilometers thick, deep enough to swallow entire mountain ranges and leave almost nothing showing.

Exposed skin can freeze in minutes.

Almost no rain falls across the interior, and the winds are among the strongest ever recorded anywhere on the planet.

There are no forests, no rivers crossing open ground, no landscape that appears capable of supporting much life at all.

But this is only the Antarctica we inherited.

Beneath the ice lies another continent.

Valleys, mountain ranges, buried basins, and the channels of rivers that stopped flowing long before the land froze.

And in the rocks that break through the ice, there are traces of a world that seems almost impossible.

Fossil leaves, pollen from dense forests, tree trunks preserved in stone, and the bones of dinosaurs that lived through months of polar darkness.

In the Transantarctic Mountains, there is even a place where you can walk up to a rock face

and place your hand on the stump of a tree.

It did not wash in from somewhere warmer.

It is still rooted in the soil where it grew, inside what is now one of the coldest places on Earth.

That tree died around 260 million years ago.

But it was not alone.

It stood in a forest on a continent crossed by rivers and covered in wetlands.

Much later, dinosaurs and early birds would move through Antarctic woodlands beneath summer skies where the sun never set,

and endure winters when it did not rise for months.

For most of its history, Antarctica was connected to Africa, India, Australia, and South America as part of the enormous southern landmass called Gondwana.

But even after those continents began to separate, Antarctica did not immediately become the frozen desert we know today.

It remained green for millions of years, long after it had drifted deep into polar latitudes.

Forests in Antarctica is the kind of phrase that sounds as though it should come with an explanation, but usually does not.

So we are going to build that lost continent back up.

What actually grew there?

What kind of forest survived a summer without sunset and a winter without dawn?

What lived among its trees?

And how did life endure the long polar darkness?

Antarctica has not always stood alone at the bottom of the world.

The rock beneath its ice rides on tectonic plates, and those plates have been moving for hundreds of millions of years.

The evidence survives in mountain ranges now separated by the Southern Ocean.

Their rocks have the same ages, the same structures, and the same scars left by ancient deformation.

A belt of rock that reaches the Antarctic coast begins again in Australia.

Another continues through India.

They are fragments of the same landscape, broken apart and carried across the planet.

The fossils tell the same story.

Remains of the same plants appear in Antarctica, India, Australia, Africa, and South America.

They could not have crossed the oceans that separate those continents today.

They grew before those oceans existed, when the land was still joined.

Continental movement alone, however, does not explain why Antarctica remained green.

By the age of the dinosaurs, the continent had already reached high southern latitudes forests grew beyond

70 degrees south in regions where the Sun vanished for weeks each year.

The fossils show that these forests grew in place near the edge of the polar night.

Antarctica could support them because the planet was warmer than it is now.

The temperature difference between the equator and the poles was less extreme, allowing warmth to reach much farther south.

But that warmth did nothing to shorten the darkness.

Earth is tilted on its axis, for part of every year, that tilt turns the southern end of the planet away from the sun.

Below the Antarctic Circle, the sun fails to rise for days.

Farther south, the darkness lasts for weeks.

At the pole, it lasts for months.

That geometry is indifferent to the weather.

It shaped the ancient forests just as it shapes Antarctica today.

Whatever the temperature happened to be, months without sunlight arrived on schedule every year.

The oldest forests in this story grew around 260 million years ago.

Woody vegetation remained in parts of Antarctica until roughly 20 - 70 million years ago.

Between those dates lie more than 200 million years of roots, rivers, and soil in the far south, all under the same extreme seasonal light.

The forests used the brief, intense summer to grow and store energy.

When winter arrived, photosynthesis slowed or stopped, and the plants endured months of reduced activity.

Most evidence of those forests is now buried beneath the ice.

What survives comes from the few places where rocks remain exposed, and from cores drilled into the seafloor around the continent.

When dinosaurs first spread through the southern world, Antarctica was still part of Gondwana.

Dinosaurs had appeared elsewhere by around 230 million years ago, although no fossil can tell us exactly when they first entered Antarctica.

The continent's oldest known dinosaur remains come from the early Jurassic.

By then, Antarctica was already far south, but it was still connected to the surrounding land.

Rivers crossed the landscape, forests covered large areas, and animals could move between regions without crossing an ocean.

Some fossils allow us to reconstruct those connections.

One example is Lystrosaurus, a squat, tusked animal that lived before the dinosaurs.

Its fossils have been found in Antarctica, India, and southern Africa.

Later fossils reveal similar links between these continents.

Scientists do not decide that two fossils are related simply because they look alike.

They compare the bones in detail, searching for features shared by several specimens that are unlikely to have appeared independently.

They also study the rocks surrounding each fossil.

When related animals occur in rocks of a similar age, and geological reconstructions show that the continents were connected at the time,

the evidence begins to form a coherent picture.

Even then, there are limits.

Most Antarctic fossils are not complete skeletons.

A single tooth or bone may identify a broad group of animals without revealing the exact species.

And when a species is found in Antarctica but nowhere else, scientists have to consider two possibilities.

It may genuinely have lived only there, or evidence of it elsewhere may still be waiting to be found.

That uncertainty matters in Antarctica, where almost the entire continent lies beneath ice.

Fossil hunters can work in only a few exposed areas, often during a short field season and in difficult weather.

The fossil record is small and uneven.

Every discovery is valuable, but no single fossil can represent the entire continent.

The separation did not happen in one dramatic event.

It unfolded over tens of millions of years.

Cracks opened in the land, some widened into valleys, then shallow seas and eventually oceans.

Old migration routes narrowed, some disappeared, while others remained open for much longer.

Antarctica stayed connected to Australia longer than it remained connected to

most of its former neighbors animals were not suddenly trapped on opposite sides of a new ocean.

For a long time, they could still move across parts of the southern landmass.

As the gaps widened, fewer roots remained.

Populations separated for long periods began changing in different ways.

They encountered different plants, climates, and predators.

Over many generations, those differences could lead to new species.

Moorosaurus, a small, plant -eating dinosaur from Antarctica, offers one clue.

It was related to dinosaurs from Patagonia, yet it also had features of its own.

Its bones point to a shared southern history, followed by a period of local change.

They cannot show us every step of that process, but they help us see what was happening as Antarctica became increasingly isolated.

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The dinosaurs of Antarctica are known from surprisingly little.

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A few bones have been found in the Transantarctic Mountains, others come from the Antarctic Peninsula and nearby islands.

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Most are incomplete – a leg bone, a vertebra, a tooth, or part of a jaw.

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There are no long rows of complete skeletons, and no single fossil bed preserving an entire Antarctic ecosystem.

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One of the best known discoveries is Cryolophosaurus, a large meat -eating dinosaur found in the Trans -Antarctic Mountains.

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It lived during the early Jurassic, long before the later dinosaurs found on the Antarctic Peninsula.

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Its skull carried a tall, curved crest, unlike that of any other dinosaur known at the time.

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The discovery confirmed that large predators had reached the far south of the early in dinosaur history.

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We do not know exactly what Cryolophosaurus hunted.

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Its teeth and jaws show that it ate meat.

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But the fossil record does not provide a complete list of the animals sharing its landscape.

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It may have hunted smaller reptiles or young plant eaters.

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It may also have scavenged.

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Fossils can show us what an animal was built to do.

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They cannot always tell us what it did on an ordinary day.

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Much later, during the late Cretaceous, a different community lived on the Antarctic peninsula.

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Moraesaurus was a small plant -eater known mainly from parts of its hind leg.

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Its bones suggest an animal built for moving quickly.

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It belonged to a southern dinosaur group also known from Patagonia, preserving another link between Antarctica and South America.

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Antarctica.

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Antarctopelta was an armored dinosaur.

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Bony plates embedded in its skin protected its body, making it difficult for a predator to attack.

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Its fossils are incomplete, so much of its appearance must be reconstructed using related animals.

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Even so, the armor confirms that Antarctic forests supported large, heavily defended herbivores.

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Titanosaurs also reached the continent continent.

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These long -necked dinosaurs belonged to the group that included the largest land animals in Earth's history.

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In 2026, scientists identified a tail vertebra collected on James Ross Island in 1985 as belonging to a titanosaur.

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The fossil had spent decades in a collection labeled only as the vertebra of a large reptile.

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It was too incomplete to identify the exact species, but it confirmed that another major dinosaur group had lived in Antarctica.

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The bone was found in marine rock.

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That does not mean the animal lived in the sea.

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Its body may have been carried from land by a river, or washed out after death before sinking to the sea floor.

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That is one of the oddities of Antarctic fossil hunting.

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Evidence of life on land is often preserved in rocks that formed beneath ancient water.

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One of the more mysterious predators is Imperibator.

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It was a large, two -legged theropod from the broad dimosaur group that includes birds and their close relatives.

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It was not an Antarctic version of Tyrannosaurus rex.

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T rex lived in North America, and no fossils from that animal had been found in Antarctica.

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Imperibator belonged to a different branch of the dimosaur family tree.

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Its remains are fragmentary, and scientists still debate its exact relationship to other theropods.

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It may have hunted, scavenged, or done both.

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Its anatomy, at least, confirms that Antarctica had large predatory dinosaurs of its own.

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Birds were also part of this world.

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One of the best known is Vajavis, an early bird related to the evolutionary line that includes ducks and geese.

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Its fossils come from near the end of the Cretaceous Period.

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Birds lived alongside non -avian dinosaurs, and some bird lineages survived the mass extinction that ended the rest.

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Animal life extended beyond the forest.

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The seas around the Antarctic Peninsula contained marine reptiles and a wide range of invertebrates.

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Mosasaurs were powerful swimmers with long bodies and strong tails.

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Plesiosaurs moved through the same water.

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Sharks and fish hunted below the surface.

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Ammonites, relatives of the modern Nautilus, were common enough to become some of the most useful fossils for dating Antarctic rocks.

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These marine fossils help scientists reconstruct the world surrounding the dinosaurs.

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Shells, teeth, and bones record changes in the sea, while their positions in the rock layers help establish when those layers formed.

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In some places, the marine record is far richer than anything preserved from the land.

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The first challenge of life in ancient Antarctica was not ice, but darkness.

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During the age of dinosaurs, Antarctica was already close to the South Pole.

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Earth's tilt brought the same basic pattern then that it brings now.

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Long summer days when the sun stayed above the horizon, followed by winter months when it did not rise at all.

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That fact is easy to overlook because because ancient Antarctica was much warmer than the continent we know today.

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But warmth did not change the shape of Earth's orbit, or the tilt of its axis.

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Every year, the polar night returned.

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Some of the trees were conifers, related to the kinds of trees that grow in southern forests today.

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There were ferns and mosses beneath them, along with ginkgos, cycads, and later flowering plants.

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At several sites, fossil wood preserves clear growth rings.

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Those rings record seasons of faster and slower growth.

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The trees did not simply grow all year.

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During the dark season, photosynthesis would have slowed or stopped.

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Plants had to use the bright summer months to produce and store enough energy for winter.

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Some trees shed their leaves, others appear to have kept them for years, much like evergreen trees do today.

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Keeping leaves did not remove the problem of darkness, but it meant the trees were ready to use the light as soon as it returned.

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And the forests?

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Were not small patches of vegetation clinging to a mild coast.

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Around 90 million years ago, a forest grew close to the South Pole itself.

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Fossil soil from West Antarctica contains roots, pollen, and spores from a swampy woodland.

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The evidence suggests a surprisingly warm climate, with average annual temperatures of around 12 degrees Celsius.

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Yet the same place still faced roughly four months of polar night.

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The dinosaurs faced the same annual rhythm.

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We know that dinosaurs lived in Antarctic forests, but we do not know exactly how each species endured winter.

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Fossils cannot show us whether an animal migrated, slept for long periods, gathered food, changed its metabolism, or grew a seasonal coat of feathers.

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These are reasonable questions, but the evidence is not strong enough to give one answer for every dinosaur.

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There are clues though.

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The presence of dinosaurs at high southern latitudes shows that they could live through extreme changes in daylight.

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Some may have remained in the region all year.

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Others may have moved between lower and higher ground as the seasons changed.

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Plant eaters would depended on what remained available in the forest.

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Predators depended on those plant eaters, so their survival was linked to the same seasonal limits.

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Young animals make the question even harder.

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A full -grown dinosaur may have carried more stored energy through winter, but smaller animals would have had less room for error.

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During the long summer, plants grew under almost continuous sunlight.

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The days were not warmer simply because they were longer, but the light lasted for many hours.

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That gave the forest a short, intense growing season.

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Rivers carried water through the landscape, wetlands supported ferns and other low plants,

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herbivores fed on what the forest produced, and predators followed them.

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This was a hard place to live, but not a frozen one, yet.

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Dinosaurs lived through polar darkness, but the ice came later.

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Around 66 million years ago, the non -avian dinosaurs disappeared during the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period.

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The forests survived.

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Conifers continued growing across the continent, ferns covered damp ground, and flowering plants became more common.

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Southern beech, or nothophagus, formed an important part of many forests.

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Relatives of these trees still grow in Tasmania, New Zealand, and southern South America.

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Their Antarctic fossils include leaves, wood, and pollen, sometimes preserved well enough to reveal the veins and edges of individual leaves.

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The animals living among them had changed.

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Birds occupied many ecological roles opened by the extinction.

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Some became large seabirds, while early penguins hunted along the coast.

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Pelagornithids developed bony projections along their jaws that resembled teeth.

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The largest had wingspans of several meters and may have traveled enormous distances over the Antarctic seas.

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Mammals also lived in the forests.

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Most are known only from teeth and pieces of jaw found on Seymour Island.

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They included marsupials and several kinds of placental mammal related to groups once found in South America.

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Their fossil suggests that animals were still able to move between the two regions before the final ocean barrier opened between them.

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One small fossil provides an especially clear picture of the climate on Seymour Island.

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Scientists found two pieces of bone from a frog that lived around 40 million years ago.

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Frogs depend on fresh water and cannot survive prolonged periods of severe cold.

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This animal belonged to a group whose closest living relatives are now found in South America.

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The fossil cannot tell us what the whole continent was like.

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Seymour Island lies near the Antarctic Peninsula, where conditions were milder than in the interior.

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It does confirm that freshwater habitats still existed there, surrounded by vegetation and and warm enough to support an animal sensitive to freezing.

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By this time, Antarctica was no longer equally warm from coast to interior.

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Ice may already have formed on high ground, while forests survived closer to the coast.

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A traveler moving inland might have passed from wet woodland into colder uplands, before eventually reaching glaciers.

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Ice and trees could exist on the same continent because the change had not yet reached every region.

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The larger shift came around 34 million years ago.

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Atmospheric carbon dioxide had fallen and global temperatures were dropping.

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Antarctica's remaining connections to other continents were disappearing.

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As ocean gateways opened, cold water began circulating more freely around the continent, reducing the amount of warmth reaching it from the north.

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Snow that once melted during summer began to remain through the year.

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It accumulated, compacted into ice, and fed glaciers that spread from high ground into valleys and towards the coast.

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The East Antarctic Ice Sheet expanded.

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Sea levels fell as more water became locked in ice, and the climate around the continent became colder and drier.

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This transformation took time, and it did not affect every region equally.

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Forests survived in some areas after ice had appeared elsewhere.

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On the Antarctic Peninsula, southern beech and conifer woodland continued through parts of the Oligocene.

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Open tundra grew alongside it.

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Mosses, ferns, and low shrubs occupied ground where taller forests could no longer survive.

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The remaining trees were living near their limits.

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Summers became shorter and cooler.

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Glaciers advanced through valleys, removing soil as they moved.

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Land that once supported woodland was buried beneath ice or stripped down to rock.

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Plants sometimes returned when the ice retreated during warmer periods, but each recovery was smaller and less diverse than the forests that came before.

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Southern beech appears to have been among the last trees to survive.

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In 2025, researchers described nothophagus leaves from King George Island in West Antarctica.

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The fossils date to the early Miocene, between roughly 22 and 20 million years ago.

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This was a tundra -like woodland adapted to a colder environment.

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The vast forests of the Dinosaur Age had already disappeared,

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leaving small pockets of woody vegetation wherever summer warmth and exposed ground still allowed roots to grow.

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There are claims that woody plants survived in Antarctica much later, perhaps until only a few million years ago.

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Fossils found near the Transantarctic Mountains have been assigned ages as young as 2 or 3 million years.

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Those dates remain debated.

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Glaciers can lift old fossils from one layer of rock and deposit them in younger sediment, making the remains appear more recent than they are.

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Because of this, it is difficult to identify the year or even the million -year interval in which Antarctica's final tree died.

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The youngest forest may still be hidden beneath the ice.

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Some fossils already discovered may be much older than the rocks now surrounding them.

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As the climate cooled, forests became increasingly rare.

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Southern beech and conifers survived for a time in the milder regions of the Antarctic Peninsula, while tundra spread across colder ground.

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Eventually, even the small woodlands disappeared appeared.

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Their living relatives in Patagonia, Tasmania, and New Zealand now provide our closest comparison with Antarctica's final forests.

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The plants are only part of what remains.

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Valleys still cross the land beneath the East Antarctic ice sheet.

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No person has walked through them, we know they exist because aircraft use radar to map the buried bedrock.

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The instrument sends radio waves through the ice and records the signals reflected from the ground below.

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By repeating those flights, scientists can trace the shape of a landscape they may never see directly. In 2023,

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one survey revealed an ancient landscape covering around 32 ,000 square kilometers in the upper catchments of the Denman and Totten glaciers.

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Elevated ground was divided by branching valleys, resembling a river network, although glaciers later widened and deepened parts of it.

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Rivers first cut through the land, smaller glaciers followed as the climate cooled.

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Once the continental ice sheets spread across the region, much of the buried surface stopped changing.

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A larger survey, published in 2025, mapped flat buried surfaces along 3 ,500 kilometers of the East

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Antarctic margin researchers interpreted them as remnants of a coastal plain

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shaped by rivers after East Antarctica began separating from Australia and before the main ice sheet formed.

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Radar cannot reveal whether trees grew in a particular valley or locate a dinosaur bone beneath the ice.

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It records the shape of the ground.

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Scientists must reconstruct the rest from that shape, the surrounding geology, and the history of the ice sheet.

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Branching valleys usually point to running water, while broad U -shaped valleys are more commonly associated with glaciers.

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When both appear together, they preserve different stages of the landscape.

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First rivers, then local glaciers, and finally the continental ice sheet.

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The survival of these features may seem surprising.

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Moving ice can cut through rock and remove entire layers of sediment, but it does not behave the same way everywhere.

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Where heat or friction produces water beneath the ice, it can slide and erode the bedrock.

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Elsewhere, the ice remains frozen to the ground and moves very slowly.

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Ancient surfaces beneath this cold -based ice can survive for millions of years with little erosion.

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Most of those places may never be excavated.

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For now, they can be mapped only from above.

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Their rocks may contain more fossils, or none at all.

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Until direct sampling becomes possible, the landscape itself is the evidence.

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The forests have disappeared, but parts of the land beneath them remain.

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Antarctica's present surface hides the continent it used to be.

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124 sentences

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

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About This Lesson

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