I would rest a bit easy.
Experts at The Field Museum in Chicago are developing an exhibit to showcase dinosaurs that once populated a far different and much warmer Antarctica, Tom Skwerski, director of exhibition operations at The Field Museum, recently explained. Exhibit designers had to overturn their own misconceptions about that ancient world and its inhabitants.
Whereas modern-day Antarctica is covered by glacial ice and snow, the landscape was once covered in lush greenery during the Cretaceous Period when dinosaurs roamed the land. The exhibit needed to connect visitors to both of those worlds, Skwerski said. Visual effects that recall the auroral displays of the southern lights will accompany immersive soundscapes, to create an exhibit environment that transports visitors back to Antarctica as it appeared hundreds of millions of years ago, he said.
The exhibit also addresses the physical challenges, both recent and historical, of conducting scientific work in Antarctica. In an introductory section in the exhibit, an interactive display offers users the opportunity to select expedition gear from a modern list or from what was available to early-20th-century explorers. Other exhibit highlights include a skeleton and a reconstruction of the carnivorous Antarctic dinosaur Cryolophosaurus ellioti, as well as dioramas showing early sauropods, Skwerski said.
Yes, Antarctica was once home to numerous dinosaurs even farther back in the Jurassic Period. Cryolophosaurus, Glacialisaurus, and the tritylodont belong to groups that possessed widespread distributions. More important, these dinosaurs differed with respect to the continent on which their nearest relative was discovered. Fossils of the closest relative of Cryolophosaurus were recovered from North America, while the closest relative of Glacialisaurus’s group was found in Asia. This lack of congruence between biogeographic patterns was consistent with a rapid dispersal between continents. Remarkably, many of the species found on Antarctica's Mt. Kirkpatrick, such as Cryolophosaurus and the tritylodont were larger than their relatives from more-temperate latitudes. Which seems to fly in the face of many studies showing that the larger dinosaurs were more often found farther north.
In any case, to support these giants, the lush forests, and the numerous predators on the Antarctic Continent, the temperatures would have been far higher in those days when the dinosaurs ruled the bottom of the world than this on 69F day.